Why I Despise FM

And MTV, for that matter.

The impetus for this was this video:



I get really annoyed by pitch and tempo-shifted songs. I realize that they're doing it to fit the commercials in, but I'd really rather listen to music at the appropriate speed.

Anyhow, I was trying to a friend that it totally changes everything about the feel of the music, and she wasn't quite on the same page with me. Maybe I'm totally neurotic, and 5% isn't a big difference, but it drives me up the wall. I built several mp3s in an attempt to illustrate time-stretch and pitch-shift. You see, the original song runs 00:05:34, and that video version runs 00:03:45; this freaks me out.

Here is the original version(ripped from lp), 00:05:34;
Here is the pitch-shifted version, 00:05:34 (5% higher pitch);
Here is the time-stretched version, 00:05:17 (5% faster tempo);
Here is the re-sampled version, 00:05:18 (5% faster tempo, 5% higher pitch--this is how the radio does it)

Hell, I still had to cut out a minute and a half to get to the length of the video. They'd cut out half of the intro, and, as it turns out, the second verse. The intro edit was easy easy, but chopping that obscene verse out proved to be more difficult (it's probably easier to do the edits before speeding it up). I got down to three and three-quarters by "cheating" and going another 2% faster. I think that it sounds really forced, but I'm totally pleased with the clean edits. Whatever, I was just playing:


Jeremy's Radio Edit