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while reading some of the questions about transcribing music here. I have come across these software tools that allow to slow down music and manipulate it freely. I think this is very interesting stuff and would like to dedicate this thread to make a kind of listing of the existing software with a description of what they can do.

It would probably be best to limit the answers to one program per answer and make the thread a community wiki. I think this can be a useful reference for when similar questions about transcriptions will come up again.

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8 Answers

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A free alternative to Transcribe, which allows you to do tons of other things too like removing vocals, is Audacity.

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up vote 13 down vote

Capo (only for Mac) is visually appealing and wonderfully easy to use. In addition to slowing music down without affecting pitch, it also uses frequency analysis to make educated guesses at the notes being played, which can speed up the transcription process tremendously.

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I found it to be totally useless for its stated purpose. Transcribe is far better. – Rein Henrichs Apr 29 '11 at 5:15
up vote 13 down vote

Transcribe helps you slow down the tempo whilst retaining the pitch. It also has other useful features for transcribing, such as placing bookmarks for sections, measures, and beats, and an equalizer for isolating instruments.

Free for 30 days.

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One of the great features of Transcribe: you can select a section of audio and it will display a keyboard with a graph of how much each pitch is present in the sound. This is especially helpful for working out complex jazz chord voicings if you're trying to transcribe a big band piece. – andyvn22 Apr 28 '11 at 0:30
Huge +1 for Transcribe. I have tried them all and Transcribe is the winner. It is built to do one thing, so if you seriously want to get into transcribing, get it. Used it for all the transcriptions on my blog. Some of the others mentioned will work, sure, but they don't offer some of the same ease-of-use and dedicated features that Transcribe has. And it is actively developed by a musician. – Basso Ridiculoso Aug 7 '11 at 21:30
up vote 8 down vote

VLAN VLC media player is a very powerful and free software for playing music. You can slow down the playing speed by decreasing the speed value at the button of the VLC media player's interface.

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useful shortcuts: [ and ] to slow down and speed up; = for normal speed. – Mechanical snail Aug 19 '12 at 23:01
up vote 3 down vote

If you have an Android Phone, a nice app is AudioSpeedChanger, you can speed up or slow down any song in your library.

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up vote 2 down vote

On Linux, you can use PlayItSlowly, which works with videos too.

Here is how it looks:

playitslowly running on Ubuntu 12.04

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up vote 1 down vote

Vox is a great, lightweight media player for OS X (0.3. beta just released with Lion support!), which also offers effects to your music output, like slowing down/speeding up without distorting pitch. Oh yeah, and it's free.

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