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All commercial recordings unfortunately are not in tune with concert pitch A440 tuning. I need to correct this on a few specific MP3 recordings so that I can play an instrument along with them without having to retune from song to song. How to do this. Thank you.

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  • Are you talking about songs being in different keys? Or songs where, for example, a guitar may be tuned to drop D. Please clarify.
    – Ben Hughes
    Commented Sep 17, 2017 at 10:36
  • Do you mean "all commercial recordings" for a specific piece(/album), or "all commercial recordings" of music period? If it's the latter, then I have severe doubts about that, especially when several artists use Autotune.
    – Dekkadeci
    Commented Sep 17, 2017 at 15:58

3 Answers 3

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Put a small weight on your turntable to adjust the spin speed.

But in all seriousness. Audacity includes a pitch shift, and it's free.

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  • +1 for the weight joke! Remember when you could buy wow/flutter correctors for CD players? Commented Sep 18, 2017 at 12:05
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Yes, many songs are sped up or slowed down post recording which also changed the pitch. Annoying for playing along or learning. I use "The Amazing Slowdowner" program to learn solos and tricky parts but you can also saved processed songs. You can adjust the speed down or up by hundreds of a second and the pitch by cents. You can keep the speed and just adjust the pitch or vice versa. I know there are many recording software that will do this too just as well (about any of them) but this is just an easy small pop up window program that only does these things. You can also crop and re-eq it.

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All but the most basic wav editing programs include a pitch-shift function. I'll get told off if I recommend specific ones! It's a pity the audio has been degraded to MP3. If you can, re-grab it from the original CD as wav. But a small pitch-shift, such as you require, will probably sound OK.

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  • "degraded to mp3" is wrong. you can encode any rate & bitdepth desired and meet mp3 format. Commented Sep 18, 2017 at 12:05
  • Carl - I get what Laurence is saying though. mp3 is lossy, so technically all mp3 is degraded audio.
    – Doktor Mayhem
    Commented Sep 18, 2017 at 12:13
  • @DrMayhem well, any recording, analog or digital, is technically lossy. Whether our ear/audio neurology can tell is another question. Commented Sep 18, 2017 at 18:20
  • Wav or pcm can be really precise. MP3 actively loses data.
    – Doktor Mayhem
    Commented Sep 18, 2017 at 21:25
  • No, once recorded we can make a distinction between lossy and non-lossy formats. It's always good to be in a non-lossy one when further processing is to be done.
    – Laurence
    Commented Sep 19, 2017 at 13:12

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