see, i was attracted to vegas because it was supposedly sound-intensive (big sound forge fan)...

yes, my computer IS one of those fancy digital ones, with plenty of processor speed, memory, and a good sound card.

what i wanted to do was take a word that a character says, divide it in half, then slow down the first half and decrease its gain, thus altering the inflection and emphasis of the word.

first problem was that messing with individual gains really lowered the sound quality of the affected event; hence the digital clipping.

then my attempts to change pitch made the first part of the word sound really choppy and echoed. so i messed with different fades, to no avail. then i removed the fades altogether, and just rammed the clips together, end to end. one at slightly slower speed with lowered gain, the other natural. the result was choppy echoed noisy sound with a loud digital pop at the cut point.

since this is impossible, maybe somebody can help me figure out how to make vegas stop violating the laws of physics. Spot mentioned bit rate. does 44 sound create problems to slow down? if so, does it make a lick of difference to convert to 48 if the source was 44?

The problem with what you're doing isn't you're not doing it right, you're not using the right settings. :) i've editied voices, music, etc in vegas a lit and haven't had any problems. Here's some things that might help you

1) turn off "quantize to frames" in the options menu.
2) when changing the speed/stretch of audio, make sure you right click on the audio clip and select "properties." The "method" under time stretch/pich shift will help (you WILL get artifacts if you go to far in an extreme).
3) if your hardware supports it, record in a higher setting then 44khz 16-bit. More samples a second = less artificats when doing effects (if the audio is stretched/pitched)

There's no way to avoid artificats if you stretch something to far. That's the nature of digital audio. Since digital audio is made up of samples, when you "stretch" an audio event you are spreading the samples out. Analog doesn't have this because because it has a higher "resolution" (a LP doesn't sound skippy slow because the needle moves along the groves slower. Technicaly it WILL start to skip when it rotates slow enough that there's a good distance between the molecules).

So, technicaly Vegas isn't te problem. Your source isn't high quality enough.

poo, if everything you do sounds like crap, perhaps the problem's not vegas? i'm not taking potshots here, but if everything sounds so crappy i suspect the audio you've recorded isn't good quality. vegas can work minor miracles on poor audio, but really, really crappy audio is beyond the aid of any audio processing tool.

since you say your familiar with sound forge, maybe you should do your sound work there instead, especially if you're already familliar with it and (as it seems) unwilling to really take the time to learn what you're doing in vegas, much less how to use vegas.

i mean, even your username is, well... "crappy". wassup with that?

so you're really not a distant relative of zippy, eh?

already been over that. what i want now is a shrubbery.

poo is vietnamese. unless zippy is short for zipperhead, i'm gonna doubt the genetic link.

ok, well, my bad on the name.
as for the shrubbery, of course you know you can have it only if you cut it down with a herring.
-nate

Now see....this makes NO sense. You lower gain and get digital distortion. I'm finding that exceptionally difficult to believe, unless you are inserting an EQ, compressor, or other tool in there.
Again, dropping the pitch of anything that is lower register, more than a couple semi-tones is terrible anyway. If it's speech, it will nearly always be noticeable because that's what the ear is accustomed to.
That said, I'm very suspicious of the tools, methods, or quality at which you recorded the original audio. low bitrate coupled with low resolution (too quiet a signal) could easily equate to terrible sound.

You know what poo could do (i made ryme!)? Record his audio onto DVD. But an el-cheapo Apex AD-500W DVD player. Play the audio on it. Use the pitch controls to adjust the pitch. It has no artifacts. It's also very cool to make thise luvie-dubby DVD's sound like a prty in hell... or vice versa!

I'd be shocked and awed if there was a DVD player that could down pitch/resample audio better than Vegas.