How does Change AIFF Speed change the playback rate?
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Concretely, the time-stretch is applied to the PCM directly and written back losslessly, which is why a lossless source is the right input for anything above about 1.5x where artefacts start to show. Choose a multiplier — 0.5x for half speed, 2x for double — and the whole file is retimed.
Will speeding it up make voices sound high-pitched?
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No. The time-stretch preserves pitch, so a 1.5x speech track sounds like the same person talking faster rather than like a chipmunk. That is the difference between a proper time-stretch and simply playing the samples faster.
Does the source format affect the result?
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It does. AIFF is Apple's uncompressed PCM format — the Mac-side equivalent of WAV, same size, same fidelity. That determines whether the retimed result can be written back cheaply or has to be fully re-encoded.
Anything specific to AIFF here?
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Yes — AIFF is big-endian PCM where WAV is little-endian; the audio is equivalent, and the choice is really about which ecosystem opens it without complaint. Worth knowing before you commit to a large speed change.
How far can I push the speed before it sounds wrong?
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Roughly 0.75x to 2x is transparent for speech. Beyond about 2.5x the stretch artefacts become audible on any algorithm, and below 0.5x the reconstruction has to invent too much. Music tolerates far less than speech does.
Does the file get shorter, and does it get smaller?
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Shorter, yes, and in exact proportion — an hour of audio at 1.5x is forty minutes. The file shrinks by roughly the same proportion because there is less material to encode. The bitrate, the sample rate and the channel layout are all left exactly as they were.
