Slow Downers.

[Simon H]

I can wholeheartedly recommend a portable solution away from your PC, The Tascam MPGT1 portable mp3 player - they call it a "guitar trainer". It holds about 240 MP3's and has the usual player functions, albeit in a very sturdily constructed case made for taking hard knocks. But it also has the ability to slow down in the same way the software does without changing key, or it will change key without changing tempo. Plus a load of effects available, a guitar input socket tuner/metronome etc etc. But its simple to use stand alone with either headphones or portable speakers.

 

It is a piece of cake to put in loop points to repeat phrases. Price around £100 on Ebay

 

The other Tascam option is their CDGT2 which does for CD's what the MPGT1 does for MP3's it comes in a little cheaper than the mp3 player too at about £85 on ebay.

 

Just because these are called guitar trainers doesn't mean they aren't ideal for learning tunes on any instrument ie concertina.

Edited September 1, 2008 by Simon H

[Baxter]

I have used the tool that is built into my Sony minidisc player; Audacity; and the Amazing Slow-Downer. It is no contest - ASD is much quicker, simpler, and more versatile than the others, and has excellent quality. I use it pretty infrequently and I still think it was completely worth the money for the easy adjustments and trivially simple pitch-matching, like when I want to play my C/G concertina along with Noel Hill's E-flat tracks. Last time I checked there was a free trial version which would only load short files - to try it out, I used Audacity to trim a file down to the first few minutes, at which point it would load into ASD and all the features would be present.

Edited September 3, 2008 by Baxter

[John Sylte]

Whats your time worth spent learning overcomplicated programs? Get the Amazing Slow Downer. I have been using it for years and years.