Capo gives you play-along tempo controls for $39

"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, http://www.dvd-to-psp.com allowing me to quickly focus in on what I needed."

Hell, Quicktime can do almost all of this for free. It looks like an awesome program but they should reduce the price to 19.99 and add some functionality that can't be found anywhere else in the same package.

Yeah, this isn't a "rarely used app" for me either. I'll be using it daily.

I also own Transcribe!, and it does have some extra features (setting to any arbitrary speed instead of set percentages would be the big one for me.)

I like Capo better because it's tiny and lightweight and makes the pitch controls more accessible. Also, it's the best-sounding slow-down app I've found.

Oh, and about Transcribe's chord-sensing features -- it's a noble effort but I've never found it the slightest bit accurate or useful. My ears do a MUCH better job, and I think there's a value in learning to do it by ear. When my ear isn't good enough I download some sheet music...

Please stop whining about the price of this app, that it is useless and this and that can do the same! They *can't*!

1. QuickTime and 33rmp all sound way worse on slowdowns. (Transcribe however does it better than Capo, I have to mention)

2. It's made for musicians and NOT for supergeeks or hobby DJs. Don't compare it to Traktor or DJay! Do you always compare apples and pears?

3. 40$ is a reasonable price for this app if you are a musician and want to learn your songs or improve your ear. Don't buy a car if you don't want to drive!

Chris, rock on! Good work!

Stacy's Mom?!?

I'm not in favor of censorship but I would love to nuke any reply that complains about the price of this app (and many others).

To the complainers…
1. Not every app is made for every one (to the person who said "but $40 dollars for a rarely-used utility is way too much.") Because you'd rarely use it, your opinion means very little compared to the user who would use it often. I would use this once a week at minimum and find $40 not only fair but generous.

2. You people would complain even if the price was half what it is! Not on any valid principle but because you're cheapskates and have this false sense of entitlement.

3. Why don't you spend hundreds of hours doing a job to give people something special, then just give it away? What? Your time is worth something? You have bills to pay and mouths to feed? Hmm…

4. Learn to be more gracious. Chris has worked hard to create something and so many of you immediately want to trash talk it. What if people do the same to you (or maybe that's the reason for your impudence)?

This is a lovely app and does just what it says it does within a fantastic UI. Sure, you can screw around with other apps to get a similar functionality, but when you are in the throes of trying to figure out a complicated piece of music with all the focus that that requires this app takes the screwing-around-with-software right out of the picture and will let you focus on learning. It's not a tool for annotating transcriptions and it shouldn't be.

Well done, Chris! I've been wanting to work out Eric Johnson's amazing fretwork in "Cliffs of Dover" for years and now I'm gonna give it a shot and I'll be able to focus on working out the fingerings rather than squinting at buttons and sliders on my monitor.

In this world where people gripe about paying more than $25 for something that isn't a multi-featured app or a suite I think this is very reasonably priced and I hope that enough people buy it so that Chris can keep developing it and perhaps work on some other apps for us musicians.

Thanks for the review. I normally use ASD but this looks to have more polish so I will definitely give it a try.

The author's claim of "Learn your Music" is qualified with his statement: "learn how they are played" on the same page. Chords, notes, tab - are all useful if you just want to simply learn to _play_ a piece of music. If you want to learn HOW it is played then you need to actually listen to the music which is what the software suggests. Agreed...it would be NICE to have the other but I think you've missed the intent of this valuable and specific genre of software. The price is introduced at less than ASD so I'm curious as I mentioned if it is competitive enough for me to switch. A comparative review would have been interesting.

Shoot, you can change pitch and speed on the fly with Quicktime.
Just open an audio track and press K.

This app is a joke.

Or for another $10 try out Transcribe! with a few more features than this app.

Most usefully it does a frequency analysis to give a fairly accurate reflection of the notes involved at any given moment so the chord can be analyzed. Provided you've got the reference tuning set up correctly it doesn't do a bad job.