Move a recording up or down in key without changing how long it is — or change both at once for the classic tape effect.
Shifting pitch alone rebuilds the audio grain by grain, so it takes a moment on long files. Small shifts of a few semitones sound the most natural.
The Pitch Shifter moves a recording up or down in key — a singer’s backing track into a comfortable range, a voice deeper for anonymity, a sample into tune with something else.
By default the length is left alone. The tool stretches the audio in time first and then plays it back faster or slower by exactly the right amount, so the two changes cancel out and only the pitch is left moved. Shifts are measured in semitones — one semitone is the gap between neighbouring piano keys, and twelve make a full octave.
Tick Let the speed change too and you get the simple tape effect instead: pitching down also slows everything, pitching up speeds it up. That is faster to compute and sounds completely clean, which is why it is worth using whenever the length does not matter.
The smallest step in ordinary Western music — the distance between two neighbouring keys on a piano, black or white. Twelve of them make an octave, which is the same note again, higher or lower.
Two or three semitones is usually indistinguishable from the real thing. Around five it starts to sound processed on voices; a full octave is clearly an effect rather than a transposition.
Because the audio has to be rebuilt grain by grain to hold the length steady while the pitch moves. Ticking "let the speed change too" skips all of that and finishes instantly.
Yes, though speech is more forgiving. Dense music with long sustained notes shows the artefacts of pitch shifting sooner than a solo voice does.
No. This shifts everything by the same fixed amount. Correcting individual notes is auto-tune, which is a different job entirely and needs a proper audio editor.