I like playing guitar along with my hifi. It often means I have to figure out the key of the song or tune. That’s OK, and while I have done dozens of songs in my collection, I still have zillions of MP3s not done. I can listen to a couple of hours’ worth of stuff in D major for example.
But the thing I dislike the most is when a track is between keys — off pitch. Eugh! I use to correct this by ear using Audacity, this can change the pitch yet keep the beats per minute the same — but the trouble with that is the preview is just the starting few seconds, and on some tracks the music proper doesn’t start for quite a while.
Now I have found Platinum Notes — a great bit of software. It fixes the volume and audio graphs (clipping etc), and tweaks the whole track to the nearest proper pitch key. It makes the mp3 file size jump to about double, but what a difference it makes! It doesn’t overwrite — it makes a new audio file adding _pn to the filename. All you do is delete the original later, and remove the _pn to be good to go. It really is worth doing, and is a LOT easier than doing this stuff my ear.
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davedevine 