I was looking for dictaphone software online to help with transcribing recordings of interviews and conference-calls (boring work-related stuff).
Came across a free package which works with all sorts of audio files (wav and MP3 for example). Guess what? It’s perfect for slowing down music files! (preserves pitch…and you can vary the amount of ‘slow-down’).
OK, it won’t slow down a CD, you’d have to rip a CD track to your hard drive (wav or mp3 format). But what the heck. It’s free. Oh, it also has a facility for recording tracks direct from your CD player or radio (whatever) connected to your PC soundcard input socket…
And being ‘dictaphone’ software, you move back and forth in the track with ease… You can mark tracks with “bookmarks” so you can skip directly to certain parts of the recording…actually, tis rather cool!!
Ok so i’ve just tried it. Its easy to use - and less intimidating than audacity, but the quality isn’t so good. Neither of them match Amazing Slow Downer, but Audacity definitely seems to do a better job than the Scribe.
On the other hand, its a simpler package, and you can adjust the play back speed on the fly (Audacity you have to apply the change of tempo to the whole file).
You can also ‘preset’ the amount of slowdown and speedup in the settings page. Using the “hotkeys” is quite cool.
So as a ‘dictaphone’ package it’s perfect for my needs here in the office, I was just impressed at the number of file-types it can cope with (including rm files, apparently). Just for an experiment I ran an MP3 of one of Lunasa’s tracks through it, and slowed it 50%… worked a treat for me.
For ‘real’ work on audio files I use Cool Edit Pro (which ain’t cheap!).
Audacity works well for recording live internet streams (or anything else that your PC speakers are playing for that matter), which is about all I use it for.
I had trouble with Amazing Slowdowner, especially with MP3s, particularly if I changed any settings with an MP3 already loaded, and must admit I don’t use it any more… I rip my CDs to MP3 and then use Cool Edit Pro to split the tunes into phrases, slow 'em down, and save the phrases so I can go over each one until I’ve ‘got it’.
I think ‘Scribe’ will be useful for transcribing tunes to dots ‘n’ scratches though, something I do from time to time 'cos it helps me really listen and ‘get it’… I seem to learn a tune faster doing that than just playing a track over and over again.
To revive this old thread a bit, I was looking for a slow downer
but for GNU/Linux (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html),
while audacity does work on GNU/Linux, I found that it wasn’t
good enough for my ears.
So an acquaintance of mine found this program called WSOLA, which
does an amazing job (IMHO, it slowed down a jig played by Seamus egan four times and still sounded amazingly good!). Anyway, the home page for the project is http://mffmtimescale.sourceforge.net/, and if you are
using Debian GNU/Linux or such, you can just install it using apt-get install wsola'. \ \ For those technically inclined, it uses a method called overlap-add technique based on waveform similarity’ to change
the time-scale (whatever that means!), here is the relevant paper which describes the method used:
@InProceedings{Verhelst:1993,
author = {Verhelst, W. and Roelands, M.},
title = {An overlap-add technique based on waveform similarity (WSOLA) for high quality time-scale modification of speech},
booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Pr ocessing},
pages = {554-557},
year = {1993},
volume = {2},
month = {April}}
But I do not use Windows, so all I can do is direct you folks to a direct download link: