I entered a new beta program today. It’s about the neat little application Capo.
Capo helps you to become a better guitar player. Capo lets you alter pitch and/or speed of your chosen song.
The image to the right is everything you see when you start Capo.
Just do what it asks you to do and drop a song onto it.
But make sure it’s mp3 or wave as Capo doesn’t accept ogg/vorbis or flac sound files. I asked Chris, the creator of Capo about that. I guess he will answer me soon, as he did before. But more about that later.
For testing purposes I chose “Tiny Little Song” from Anne McCue. It’s from her 2005 record “Roll”. Everything works like a charm, nothing so much about beta there.
You can alter reduce the speed by clicking on one of the choices.
You even have the option to increase speed – but I still have to find a decent use for that.
Changing the pitch produces funny results, just listen to the provided audio file. It starts at regular pitch and then is reduced to about -13. I bring the pitch back to 0 then up to the maximum of +24. After that down to the minimum of -24. So you can get an idea of the range.
You can use all the common keyboard shortcuts (Space = Play/Pause, Cmd-O = open new file etc.), but there are no preferences. That doesn’t mean you need them. After all there is not much to fine tune here - but I noticed it and just wanted to tell.
The most important feature for practicing that crazy Eddie VanHalen solo you tried to learn for 2 years now is, of course, looping. And Capo doesn’t disappoint here either. Very simple but clever design: Just select the part you want to loop. And press the little play button and the loop starts. Only thing I don’t like that much: You use SPACE to pause the loop and the again to resume it, it quits the loop and just plays the song. So you always have to use the small play button to start the loop again. I can’t think of a better solution, though.
The bottom left is a slider for the volume the bottom right offers a zoom for perfectly choosing the miliseconds. (see next screenshot)
As I really liked Capo the minute I tried it, I chose to take Chris’ special beta offer. The regular price will be $39 (~€29) but he offers it for $9 during the beta program. That’s a no-brainer I believe. When you want to buy Capo you can pay with credit card or PayPal. The credit card method uses a in-app formular to process your check-out. I tried to pay via PayPal first and got redirected to the website. There I was confronted with a total of $39. I first thought I did something wrong, but every time I retried I had the same total of $39. I wrote an email to Chris and he replied within minutes. Obviously this was a beta problem, as the credit card check-out didn’t have this problem. So I chose credit card as payment method and had my license. Matter of seconds. Chris promised to take care of the website/PayPal issue and wanted to fix it this weekend.
So all you have to do now is apply for the beta program, try Capo and buy it.
I am glad I did.
