mplayer: changing speed without changing pitch (avoiding the chipmunk effect)

In mplayer, you can change the playback speed with [ or ], but that probably changes the pitch as well (naturally). Can be amusing the first time, but not after you realise that it is actually possible to do something sophisticated to avoid this. (Wikipedia calls it Audio timescale-pitch modification) Many other media players (including VLC and even Windows Media Player(?)) can do this automatically; here’s how to do it in mplayer.

Short answer:

Start mplayer as mplayer -af scaletempo
That’s it. The catch is that you need to get an mplayer which has the scaletempo filter, and we know how much the mplayer project loves making releases. (It’s not in Ubuntu at the time of writing.)

So, either

Get such an mplayer
e.g the deb from Sourceforge (here),

or

Start mplayer as mplayer -speed 1.5 -af ladspa=tap_pitch:tap_pitch:0:-33:-90:0 foo.avi

Seems even the latter might require installing the ladspa plugins.

For more on all this, see:

1. blog comments (with patches) at Pitch-Correct Play Speed with MPlayer
2. Change MPlayer Playback Speed
3. Mplayer FAQ: “How do i change mplayer speed but keep pitch the same?”

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