{"id":3472,"date":"2009-01-19T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-18T15:57:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-03-28T14:45:31","modified_gmt":"2013-03-28T21:45:31","slug":"transcribe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/transcribe\/","title":{"rendered":"Transcribe!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m learning to play blues harp, so in addition to the previously-reviewed Amazing Slow Downer<\/a>, I’ve tried a number of programs that let you manually control the speed of a tune without changing the pitch. I have to say without reservation that Transcribe! is the clear winner. Its simple user interface is completely intuitive and easy to use. To select a section of music you want repeated, all you have to do is drag the cursor over the section of the displayed waveform, choose a preset speed from 15 percent to 150 percent, and play. You can add markers to the sections you want to come back to later as well.<\/p>\n

Compared to Transcribe!, Amazing Slow Downer’s interface is just awkward. First of all, there is no displayed waveform, which, to me, is a minimum requirement for this type of software. So to select the start and end points of a section, you have to play the piece to *audibly* locate the section you want and then jockey with two sliders to set the endpoints — a very time consuming and annoying process. To select the speed there is another slider that makes it almost impossible to select whole number increments or repeat a desired speed. There’s also no marker capability, so you have to go through this awkward procedure every time you want to practice a different section. While two programs — Guitar and Drum Trainer<\/a> 3 and SlowGold — do have a graphical waveform display, they are still very awkward to use.<\/p>\n

When I am learning a song, I go through it bar by bar, and, by repeating the bar at a slow speed and playing it on the harmonica, I type down the tab for each note. After I have transcribed the whole piece, I then select larger sections and repeat them slowly, playing along using the tabs for guidance, and gradually increase the speed until I’ve got it. I’ve tried all the programs I mentioned above and then some. I just couldn’t believe how difficult other programs make this process. Transcribe! just works. I have been using it for around two years on Windows XP; from the screen shots, it looks like it’s identical for Mac OS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

User-friendly audio slower<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11138,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472\/revisions\/11138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}