Music is an interesting thing to slow down, but it is difficult to slow down music to the extreme without getting a bad digital effect or chopping noises.
Luckily for those of us who like to massively slow down music, it is possible to slow down music to this extreme without getting a digital effect using a program made to do just that: Paul’s Extreme Stretch.
Paul’s Extreme Stretch is completely free and open source. It is only suitable for slowing down music to major factors, up to 1e+018x times slower (meaning a 2 minute 30 second song would take about 4.27789 trillion years to play) if you really wanted (and somehow had the hard drive space to store something like that…). The program can play the audio live, it does not have to render before it can play the stretched audio.
Interestingly, you can hear a live stream of Beehtoven’s 9th Symphony stretched over a 24 hour period if you want an idea of what this program can do. Read more about that here.
More realistically, you can slow down the audio to reasonable speeds that can still be followed (such as 5-15x slower). This is extremely pleasant to listen to with classical music.
Slowing rock music down doesn’t sound great, but classical and instrumental without drums and vocals sounds fantastic. You can hear each individual instrument begin playing.
Visit the official website here: http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/
