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Participant
May 13, 2024
Open for Voting

Maintain Audio Pitch - improve sound quality?

  • May 13, 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 1525 views

Whenever I need to increase the speed of an audio clip while maintaining pitch, I resort to taking it out of Premiere and into Audition because Premiere's "Maintain Audio Pitch" sounds terrible.

 

I don't love that workflow, because it replaces the original clip destructively, so if I need to go back and adjust the length in the future, I have to hunt down the original clip and do the whole process over again.

 

I figured out a workaround to non-destructively alter the clip within premiere by using the pitch shifter effect combined with the speed effect (see video).

 

The fact that I can easily do this with Premiere's own tools begs the question "Why isn't this simply how the maintain audio pitch option sounds?"

 

I'd love to see this feature fixed in Premiere.

 

3 replies

Participating Frequently
November 18, 2025

There seems to be a sync issue. I had a 1 hour long video take that I sped up by 1500%  (yes, a bit extreme) and I had Maintain Audio Pitch enabled. The sound had drifted out of sync already at about halfway through the clip (and it got progressively worse towards the end). Seems like a mismatch between the sound timestretch and the video speed remap.

It was a 60 fps composition with 25 fps video in it (but sped up drastically), if that makes a difference.

Participating Frequently
November 18, 2025

It sounds like a FFT timestretch algorithm (instead of time window) so yeah, it do be sound like that. A bit smeared.

 

I'm baffled though that Premiere has to render the preview before playback. Reaper does stuff like this at runtime without breaking a sweat.

Participant
May 13, 2024

even from launch i've never had this feature work well even though it works flawless in Audition. would also LOVE to have it fixed. Its something I use every single day.