If you’re a musician trying to learn a new song or another musician’s technique and you’d like to use your Mac to help, you might want to download Roni Music’s Amazing Slow Downer utility for the Macintosh. It enables you change the speed of music played on your Mac’s CD-ROM without changing the pitch. It also works in realtime, so you don’t need to go through the laborious process of recording tracks from the audio CD to your Mac first.
In addition to realtime processing, the software supports the ability to import and play MP3, AIFF and WAV format files. The ability to save and process AIFF and MP3 files is new to the latest version, 1.05.
Using Amazing Slow Downer, you can slow down the music to 50 percent its normal speed, and you can speed it up to 400 percent its normal playback rates, too. You can also change the pitch in semi-tones, either at full or lower speed; and you can adjust the pitch in cents.
System requirements call for a PowerPC-based Mac with Mac OS 8 or higher. A trial version is available for download. Amazing Slow Downer costs US$40 to register.