Gear Review: Slow Down Music Player - iPhone/iPod Touch App

In my quest to learn more songs, I've been searching for some kind of software that would allow me to slow down songs without changing pitch. I'm cheap, too, so I was looking for something on the free side. While looking for Windows or Mac applications, I came across this iPhone/iPod Touch app called Slow Down Music Player. The price was right (free), so I installed in on my iPod and imported Joe Satriani's classic "Always With Me, Always With You."

The app's interface is very basic as you can see in the image on the right, meaning it's not very pretty, but it works quite well. The small player buttons are hard to hit sometimes, but on the whole it's pretty intuitive and easy to use. The app allows you to both slow down the tempo and also adjust the pitch, so if you're learning a song that's tuned to Eb, you can raise the pitch by a semitone so you don't have to retune your guitar, which is perfect for guitars like my RG that have a floating tremolo.

The crowning achievement of this app, though, is the ability to create "licks," slices of songs that you can use to loop through tricky parts, or just divide a song into sections to learn a bit at a time. This feature allowed me to break down the Satch song and learn some of the more difficult licks easily. In fact, I learned about two thirds of the song in the span of a few hours, which I wouldn't have been able to do without this software.

This is an essential piece of software for any guitarist, especially a beginner or intermediate like me. The free version is limited to three imported songs - for $2.99 you can upgrade to the full version and that limitation is removed.

It's not without its bugs, though. The most annoying bug is in the lick editor. There is a text box at the top to enter a name for the lick. By default it's filled with the words "no name" that are ghosted out once you select it. But if you don't type the lick name fast enough, the "no name" entry will no longer be ghosted out and your typed characters will start appearing after the "e." So I had to very quickly type in the lick name, which meant no capital letters (the shift key takes too much time) and no concern for spelling or typos. And as you probably know by now, typing quickly on the virtual keyboard isn't exactly easy.

It also doesn't do landscape orientation well. At all. The screen moves but the layout doesn't, so the controls at the bottom get hidden unless you scroll up. When I used it, too, it sometimes skipped, and sometimes stopped playing altogether. The skips are annoying, and that may be because my iPod is almost full, but when it stopped playing (actually just stopped producing sound; the app was still playing the song) I just hit the stop button and restarted it and it was fine.

These minor annoyances don't hinder the usefulness of this app, though. But I'm going to stick with the free version until these bugs are worked out. Once they are, the $2.99 price tag is an absolute bargain. Even in its current state, it deserves a place on all guitarists' iPods. I give it a 4 out of 5 because of the bugs; a bug free Slow Down Music Player would be a no-brainer perfect 5.

Score: ★★★★☆
Summary: A must-have for any guitarist, minor bugs keep it from a perfect score.