Introducing BPMinus
Hello, drummers! I've written an application that I think some of you may find useful! A little history - I myself am a drummer, and I would often find myself trying to learn or transcribe songs that were too fast to play along with or even transcribe. One day, a music teacher recommended I try a program to slow down music. It was pretty, well, amazing - it would slow down music without changing the pitch. I had no idea such tools existed. Unfortunately, I found the user interface to be pretty lacking. It looked like it was designed in the early days of Windows and hasn't been given a facelift since.
Being a software engineer (my day job), I thought I could do better. I learned the secret to slowing down music was a set of algorithms known as a Phase Vocoder. It became my mission to take various phase vocoder technologies, put them in a spiffy interface, and release it to the world.
So, here we are. I have a product, it's called BPMinus, and I would love to get some feedback from the talented musicians - especially music teachers here at Drummerworld. It's Windows-only for now. I'm looking into creating a Mac and iOS version!
Here is a quick rundown of features:
Change the tempo of your track without altering its pitch. BPMinus offers multiple methods of controlling the tempo, allowing you to find a solution that sounds the absolute best for the track you're working with.
Alter the pitch of your tracks with built-in pitch adjustment. Pitch adjustments work independently of tempo adjustments so you can hear your tracks at a different octave without altering the timing!
BPMinus features a vector interface that allows you to enlarge your view of the application without blurring or losing quality. This is perfect for the practice studio environment where you may be far away from the display.
While BPMinus supports many of the most popular audio formats out of the box, it also features an extensible add-on mechanism that allows users to support just about every audio file format. See the Add-Ons page for more information!
Focus on the portion of audio you really want to work with. BPMinus allows you to simply specify a loop region with a simple mouse drag. Alternatively, use the keyboard to specify exact audio loop points down to a hundredth of a second.
BPMinus's beat analysis attempts to analyze the original tempo of your audio track. As you adjust the tempo, both the active and original tempo are displayed. This useful tool helps musicians to get a true feel for playing at specific tempos.
Check out the BPMinus Website