Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Multimedia, Software, Developer
Capo gives you play-along tempo controls for $39
Capo is a new app from the makers of TapeDeck, and it's the talk of the town amongst musicians -- it allows you to simply change the speed or pitch of any songs you happen to have laying around your computer, so that you can play or sing along with them at your own pace. We got a chance to try out the app just before release (though it's available for $39 right now), and while the UI is very impressive, the actual purpose of the app is too limited, in my opinion, to be worth it.
Not that it does anything badly -- the speed and pitch manipulation are very impressive. While there's a little bit of clipping and distortion at the absolute extremes, that's to be expected when you're changing these attributes on the fly, and when you're not at the extremes, things sound really great here. The app is extremely responsive to the controls as well, which are very intuitive and well designed -- you can choose to quickly select various tempos or pitches on a meter, or drag the slider in between those to find exactly the point you want. And no matter how fast you move the slider, the music responds instantly without any noise or slowdown. If you want to change a song's pitch or speed in order to try to play along with it or give it a closer listen, Capo will let you do exactly that, in style.
Not that it does anything badly -- the speed and pitch manipulation are very impressive. While there's a little bit of clipping and distortion at the absolute extremes, that's to be expected when you're changing these attributes on the fly, and when you're not at the extremes, things sound really great here. The app is extremely responsive to the controls as well, which are very intuitive and well designed -- you can choose to quickly select various tempos or pitches on a meter, or drag the slider in between those to find exactly the point you want. And no matter how fast you move the slider, the music responds instantly without any noise or slowdown. If you want to change a song's pitch or speed in order to try to play along with it or give it a closer listen, Capo will let you do exactly that, in style.
But at the same time, that's where the functionality stops. Bringing music into the program is not quite as intuitive the rest of the controls -- you can bring in tunes from your iTunes playlist through the "Open" menu, but the first screen just asks you to drag music in rather than giving you the browsing option right away. And if you don't already know the chords or notes to a song, Capo won't help you with that -- it'll help you slow the song down so you can hear them better, but if you can't tell what they are that way, you're still out of luck unless you go find them elsewhere. Maybe it's a lot to ask an app to tell me what chords are playing in my songs, but given that Capo's page says it will help you "learn your music," and calls it "an essential part of a guitarist's tool set," that's something I kind of expected.
There's no way to open a side window to mark tabs or show lyrics -- you can put custom verse, bridge and chorus markers in the song, but those don't appear as much more than flags on the top timeline. It seems like it would have been a good idea, given that you're probably playing with this app open, to let you mark chords or lyrics in the window. In fact, there's no evidence other than the name that this is even supposed to be a music app -- if you just wanted to pitch-shift someone's voice track, you could do it in here, and there wouldn't really be any features going to waste.
And it's for that reason that I consider the app pricey -- at 40 bucks, I was hoping for a little something more than just a pretty pitch- and time-shifter. It would be nice if the app really did commit to help you "learn your music," rather than just slow it down to your speed and transpose it to your key (whatever that is -- the pitch meter goes from -24 to +24, so there again you need to either do it by ear or figure out for yourself how much you need to move the meter to match up). But if that's what you want to do and $40 is what you're willing to pay, Capo is a great app.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
GLaDOS said 12:37AM on 4-22-2009
I agree that this app is WAY too limited for $40. :/
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MilanNyc said 12:50AM on 4-22-2009
any decent music software can do that... Peak, Logic, etc... on a PC i think it's Sound Forge, but the thing is all the software I just mention does some serious music editing too and this one doesnt. $40? I'll pass.
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mikeash said 2:27PM on 4-22-2009
And all the software you mentioned? Hundreds of dollars. A vastly lower price for a specialized program sure sounds like a reasonable deal to me.
G said 4:16PM on 4-22-2009
Or Wave Editor from Audiofile Engineering. It's $79 and does far more than twice as much.
Greg said 9:38PM on 4-22-2009
Audacity can do this for free...
Bob S. said 12:53AM on 4-22-2009
Aside from guitar stuff, will this help me repair live recordings that are off-pitch? You can't just raise or lower the pitch, because (assuming the recording was distorted by dying batteries that would run the recorder too slow) the time will be off when played on a speed-corrected cassette player. You need software that will correct both the pitch (which is an absolute) and the time (which requires a pretty good algorithm and some knowledge of whether the cassette was 60, 90, 100, or 120 minutes). Any thoughts?
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Taylor said 8:07AM on 4-22-2009
I know in Audacity, open source program, you can change the SPEED of a recording (which increases both tempo and pitch).
It also has functions for just increasing tempo or just increasing pitch.
Chris Liscio said 8:42AM on 4-22-2009
Bob, I've not added any kind of export feature. In all honesty, I didn't even consider it, as I have a laptop, and do all my learning with that.
You're certainly not the first person to ask for this, and I'm considering it for a future release.
Andrew Neely said 1:51AM on 4-22-2009
This program competes with predecessors like the venerable $50 "Amazing Slow Downer" and a series of hardware based guitar trainers that cost 3 to 4 times this amount of money. It's essentially a niche focused transcription tool and I'd say at first blush it's indeed a very nice one.
To my ear it sounds better than my previous two transcription solutions when applying time-shifting, which can be crucial in actually hearing what's going on in a busy track while slowing it down enough to learn fast runs of notes.
I make about two thirds of my current income working in a music act that plays songs ranging from Patsy Cline to Fallout Boy and we constantly add songs to our repertoire. My usefulness to the group is based on my ability to come to rehearsal ready to polish material that I've already learned on my own.
I was able to drag one song I'm working on right out of the iTunes playlist I use for band material into the interface. Further I could fine tune the just section I wanted to loop as it played, allowing me to quickly focus in on what I needed.
You actually left out one of the most useful features, which is that the program can save a tiny meta-file for each song you work with. This means you can re-open it with the looping points, pitch and time shifting just as you left them. This feature by itself sets Capo apart for me as a useful and well thought out tool for a working musician.
As a bassist, chord charts are useful for context, but often I actually need to transcribe a very specific part. Further, chord and lyric sites are often plagued by inaccurate user-submitted chord charts and subject to the same-take down notices that happen to other sites that traffic in someone else's intellectual property, anyway.
The bottom line is that ear transcription is a skill that any gigging musician has to build at some point in their career. If this application saves me even 25% of the time that I spend on learning songs, its $40 price tag is well worth the hours of my life I'll get back.
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Alex said 2:55AM on 4-22-2009
33pm. Much cheaper, does exactly the same thing.
http://www.edenwaith.com/products/33rpm/
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mad matt said 4:22AM on 4-22-2009
if you really want a cool app that does the same and more on os x, you should try out "DJay". it lets you do all the above, and lets you virtually scratch the songs and mix mutiple together with effects and even lets you play them in reverse (at any speed/pitch). i use it almost more than itunes because of how cool and easy it is to make cool mixes and play playlists.
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ELECTRO hyena said 10:03AM on 4-22-2009
just like traktor, torq, and ssl which are all better solutions for that.
also, the fact that the above distorts is quite honestly atrocious - the lastest version of ableton live can handle speed increases/decreases of up to 50% with almost no artifacting that i can percieve... Torq can handle a long turntable brake down the the point it can't even read the timecode anymore without clipping or distorting. If you're paying $40 for a lame timestretch algorithm it better be at least on par with everything else.
Chris Liscio said 10:48AM on 4-22-2009
The use of 'distortion' to describe Capo's audio quality is quite inaccurate. Capo does not affect the volume of the waveform, at all. And, as the author of the very successful FuzzMeasure audio analysis package, I think I know a thing or two about what distortion is…
Capo has, in my opinion, a fantastic slow-down algorithm. It uses the system-supplied time-pitch audio unit, with a maximum render quality setting applied to it for best results.
This is the same audio unit available in Apple's own audio apps, and it works great. If you A/B Capo's slow-down quality with other packages, I'm sure you will agree that it's basically the same, and possibly better in some cases.
ELECTRO hyena said 2:44PM on 4-22-2009
So what you're saying is I can pop the track into garageband and load up the AU host and achieve the exact same result your software does for $40?
Well, good advertising :)
Ben Dodson said 4:34AM on 4-22-2009
If it's just a case of changing tempo and pitch, you can do that in Quicktime by opening up your music file and choosing 'A/V Controls' from the Window menu. There are a load of options there for increasing speed, adjusting pitch, etc. It's what I always do when I want to make something a bit faster...
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bikeham said 4:41AM on 4-22-2009
Too expensive for me, but I can see that a few people might get their moneys worth. 33rpm might be worth a look, thanks for the heads up.
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Jash Sayani said 6:35AM on 4-22-2009
400 bucks is too steap for this!! I bet there are free alternatives to this...
And if you have a Mac with iLife, then Garageband can do this!
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Jash Sayani said 6:36AM on 4-22-2009
Sorry I meant 40 bucks.
The keyboard on my Acer aspire one netbook is too small!
Michael Moncur said 7:17AM on 4-22-2009
What is this, the iTunes App Store? Where people complain about every $4.99 app costing too much?
I've bought a competing app for $60, and Capo sounds much better. $40 is the cost of 1-2 guitar lessons, and I'll get at least that much value out of this.
And yes, other software can do it. Heck, I have a full version of Ableton Live, which cost 10 times the price of Capo, and it can do the same thing, but Capo is a convenient, lightweight practice tool that I can pop up any time I need to work on a song.
I just bought Capo and my $40 was well spent.
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Joe said 10:37AM on 4-22-2009
Interesting that you'd mention Ableton - I was thinking along the same lines. Most musicians who would want this sort of feature already have some other audio apps (I use Cubase myself) that can do the same thing.
If this app incorporated some other tools for organizing and notation, I'd consider it - for example, a playlist of songs, good A-B loop options, an easy way to chart out and print chord progressions (or full-on notation for non-guitar instruments), a "task list" for keeping track of which sections you need to learn, per-song (or per-instrument) equalizing options to partially isolate certain instruments, and so on. But just slowing down a track on the fly? That's not worth introducing another app into the workflow even if it was free.