A long time ago, someone gave me an mp3 player. I only used it a few times, but I do remember there was a weird setting that allowed you to speed up or slow down audio-- I suppose in case you just HAD to listen to "Blue Velvet" but we're going out for a run and needed to speed it up to 120bpm.  I dunno...  

Slower, depending on how its processed (and I'm totally making this up here, btw) might knock it a few cents off? 


(I will not say that you need a better mp3 player.  I will NOT.) ;)

Did you accidentally convert to 48,000 instead of 44,100?

is it possible your ear pitch has changed instead? it is happening sometimes e.g. during cold or in very humid weather.
Never heard actually pitch could change during conversion, quality yeas but pitch...

Where/when are these gigs, Herb?
I'll bring my video camera.

Greg.... Tea Party rally Oct 13 noon W Nash st Wilson on the library lawn..... doing 2 of my more political compositions..... and then later that evening in Youngsville .... the Beano festival which my buddy Wolf started is happeing on a farm up there..... and since I wrote that song for Wolf.... I guess I need to be there and play it for the crowd. 

You are welcome at both..... I'll get you in to the second one if you want to go.  The first is free. 

I'll bet it's the player, not the conversion. Cheap players take great liberties with your sound because they're basically software audio interfaces, and prone to every kind of artifact known to digital audio. You're supposed to use $3 ear buds with them so you won't notice. Invest in a better player and you'll be able to use it onstage with higher reliability than a portable CD player.

I use some decent ear buds and it sounds good.... great fidelity. It's literally out of tune (flat) by a noticeable amount. I may just bite the bullet and do the laptop source thing.  

After doing the tests confirming the file is ok... I'd say it's clear that the clock in the Sansa is slow which is making the sound seem "flat".

It's not much of a surprise, but is an interesting curiosity. The clock, or oscillator, is one of the more critical components in a DAC and a digital device made for low pricing is the least likely to have a good one.

I hope you have fun entertaining the crowd.


best regards,
mike

My Sansa Clip+ plays wavs, flacs and all sorts of uncompressed audio in various formats.
 
Perfectly well.
 
I'd not use it for a live situation though, it's just too fiddly to get at what you want in a hurry.  Not sure what the issue you are having there but I'd wager it's not the device.
 
The idea of the playback being too slow or drifting sounds like ghost stories from the cassette era to me, it doesn't take much to get an accurate clock pulse to run a digital device these days.  The 'clock' or 'oscilattor' isn't a critical component it's an essential one, a digital device cannot even function without it, so much so even the ones found in top end gear never amount to much more than a few cents worth. 
 
Put it this way the clock in your mp3 player will probably be more accurate than the one in your tuner which is likely working on an 11,025 Hz sample of the input it is 'hearing'.
 
It always amuses me the 'high-end' gear argument when a lot of that stuff is powered by clocks furnished by vendors such as Realtek or their ilk.
 
If the device is running at the wrong speed it will at least consistently run at the wrong speed, not as a malfunction of the clock but much like a cheap digital watch will keep perfect time once you've adjusted it, because the current sent to it, regulated by the supporting components, is out of whack.
 
FWIW the output coming out of my similar device via the D/A converter (the phones out socket) lines up pretty much perfectly with the project that created it. 
 
Here's a little something for Mike to ponder but for practical purpose Herb, I'd follow James' suggestion.
 
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ee100/docs/Chapter8.pdf

bitflipper


I'll bet it's the player, not the conversion. Cheap players take great liberties with your sound because they're basically software audio interfaces, and prone to every kind of artifact known to digital audio. You're supposed to use $3 ear buds with them so you won't notice. Invest in a better player and you'll be able to use it onstage with higher reliability than a portable CD player.

As I'm not an 'actual digital audio engineer' I've learned some of the things that Ethan Winer has taught me and forewent the time I had set aside to perform a self-pedicure and put a little test together to see if I could ascertain what defined 'cheap' here.
 
I metered the output from the headphone out on my interface to match the output on my Sansa player.  There was a small discrepancy between the test sine wave file I used on both systems, but when I say small I mean in the order of .06% on 1000 Hz.
 
After setting the levels I put the outputs into an A/B box and took the 'phones out of that.  I used progam material from the same 44.1 kHz 16 bit file on both systems and got a willing operator to cue up different parts of the playback file on one system whilst listening to the other and to switch between the two whilst they played back.
 
After 20 iterations of guessing which source I was listening to I scored a sad 55%.  IOW I was guessing.
 
I enjoy the idea that I can get a greater level of fidelity out of a £25 audio player than a '70's audiophile could get from £5000 worth of kit.  I can understand that some would still have trouble coming to terms with that.
 
Maybe I'd enjoy it more if I paid £100 plus for something that has an Apple logo on it but I doubt it would be to do with the output quality.
 
Man I only ever use it for in the car or in the Dr's waiting room and the fact it has 12 Gb of storage on it has come in handy many a time, but I'm actually proud of it now.