Transcribe! for Mac OS-X

Software to help transcribing recorded music. Slow down music. Analyze chords.

Transcribe! for Mac OS-X  Review

Transcribe! is an assistant for working out a piece of music from a recording. Transcribe! offers many features aimed at making the transcription job smoother and easier, including the ability to slow down the music without changing its pitch, and to analyse chords and show you what notes are present. Features: Depending on version, Transcribe! reads audio from many different types of audio file and audio CD. It displays the audio waveform and allows you to scroll around, place markers for sections, measures and beats, and easily play or loop from any point. You can also add textual annotations. Loops and positions can be stored and recalled. There are many keyboard shortcuts and you can configure these as you like. You can configure Transcribe! to respond to MIDI (not on Linux) so as to keep your hands free : start and stop playback with your feet! There is extensive and readable help accessible from within the program. The "spectrum" feature displays the strength of the various pitches in any chord or note you select, in the form of a graph - a wavy line over a piano keyboard graphic. The height of the various peaks in the graph indicate the strength of the note above which the peak appears. This is not a magic bullet for analysing chords but it can be a very useful source of information. Transcribe! offers various audio processing effects (Slowdown, Pitch Change, EQ filtering etc) intended to help with transcribing. These effects all run in "real time" unless your machine is old & slow. This means there is no pre-processing or other waiting, the processing is performed on-the-fly while playing and you can instantly hear the effect of changes to EQ etc. For instance if you press the half-speed button while playing then playback simply continues, at half speed.