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Capo: My new Mac app for helping musicians learn their music

17 pointsby liscioabout 16 years ago

7 comments

anigbrowlabout 16 years ago
It's not worth $39, certainly not $49. I haven't even used it, just looked at your web page: but I have a strong professional background in this area, so I know what it does.<p>There are many shareware programs which do this, and others are free: this goes double for plugins, and there's a better than-even chance that a musician who likes computers already has some kind of multitrack software which accomodates plugins. They likely also have a hardware audio interface with a special low-impedance input for plugging in a guitar and got equivalent software for free. So that's black mark #1 - you're not offering much new functionality.<p>Black mark #2 is your interface. It is beautifully clean, I applaud that. However, while an audio waveform is wonderful for engineers, it's not so much for musicians. It might be better to generate a low-resolution spectral display, by applying (say) a 256-band FFT which won't cause any computer to break a sweat but would give a more musically meaningful presentation, and set you apart from the competition. As you have already implemented pitch-independent time stretching, you probably know how to do this.<p>Personally, I would not waste so much space on the album art either, but that's me.<p>I'd like to see you add some more features, which wouldn't break your interface. While decomposing a a piece of music into polyphonic pitch information is hard (see <a href="http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=635" rel="nofollow">http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=635</a> for the technology leader), deriving the 8key* of the music from a relatively coarse FFT analysis is not so difficult. Having the key signature, and indeed the bpm, appear on the left side or over blocks in the audio display should be easily achievable and would add a lot of value.<p>Another thing you could do is offer a button to extract or remove the top (usually vocal) melody line. This is easy: take a stereo file, invert one channel, and add it to the other. this will give you a (mono) karaoke track, since the vocals are almost always panned to the center. You'll lose the kick drums and bass too, but you could limit to the bandwidth of the human voice. Invert and add the karaoke channel to both sides of the stereo waveform, and you'll get <i>only</i> the center, allowing the musician to either copy or accompany the lead vocal and not much else. There's nothing more complex than a multiply-add operation going on here ((waveform.position.leftchannel.samplevalue * -1) + waveform.position.rightchannel.samplevalue ...etc.) so you should be able to do this in realtime with virtually no performance hit.<p>Finally, consider taking the live stream of input from the microphone input (eg the guitar), FFting it, and doing a loose correlation with the FFT of the playing track to derive a little 'accuracy' meter. Of course there will be much more audio information in the track unless it's also an acoustic guitar solo, but the frequency response of the live input should be a subset of this as long as the musician is playing in time. When they start to drag or lead the backing track, the energy of individual frequency bins will exceed those of the backing track.<p>Sorry for being so harsh, but I do think you're asking too much for something that most people will perceive as little more than a 'hello world' audio program. If I were you I would protoype the functionality in reaktor or some other visual-programming tool, add some more useful and unusual modes of display or operation as above, and then bring that back to your clean interface.
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liscioabout 16 years ago
I've been a full-time indie Mac developer since Feb 2008, and this is the third product in my Mac products lineup.<p>It's not the same kind of 'startup' that you folks tend to talk about (not a hosted service, in the cloud, etc), but it's what I do for a living.<p>Questions about the business, the tech, the features, etc.? I'll gladly answer them here.
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Jasberabout 16 years ago
This is great.<p>How difficult would it be to detect the notes that are being played by the bass? This would be useful for someone who is new to playing by ear and soloing.<p>For example, you pickup that the bass progression is G A D C--that makes figuring out the correct chords (and notes for soloing) even easier.
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kjellabout 16 years ago
I picked up Capo while it was in beta for $9. I bought it after about 30 seconds of playing with it. Loved everything about it. I'd previously scorned the use of slow-downers as a crutch, and more recently given in to Audacity for figuring out the blistering stuff that I'd never have been able to learn (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoRRjEZaN1M" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoRRjEZaN1M</a>).<p>Its interface was the leading factor. It just worked, looked nice, made me feel good. Capo outranks audacity for speed–bending ten-fold. When the $40/50 price was announced I was however very glad I'd heard about it ahead of 1.0 and snuck into the beta program.
gabrielrothabout 16 years ago
The interface looks lovely -- I'm sure I'll download the demo at some point when I next pick up my guitar.<p>I'd be interested to hear your thinking when it came to setting the price.
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frigabout 16 years ago
Are you doing naive speed adjustment or taking more of a recycle-esque approach?
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damada2about 16 years ago
cool app...downloaded the trial.