Slow Down Music Trainer: An Ipod app I'm willing to pay for

I’ve been a couple months with my Touch so far, and the app choices are endless. But as I have a 8gig model, I’ve been trying to keep it to apps I actually use. I’ve been hesitant to buy anything I couldn’t try in a lite or free version first. As mentioned previously, I did pop for ewallet, but other apps I use don’t require the paid features (like Evernote, I’ll never even approach their minimum paid server size). I did by a couple 99 cent games and some gimmicky music apps (iShred LE and Guitar LE).

One app that I tried in free (hobbled) version and then ended up buying is Slow Down Music Trainer.

Some history:
I have a Tascam CD-GT1 MKII guitar trainer, which has a million features (clunkily interfaced) that I only use a couple of. The main feature I use is to slow down a song while maintaining the pitch to play along with… a task it does well (though the sound quality suffers exponentially the more you slow the song down) The other feature is to change the pitch of a song to match standard guitar tuning (in which the audio quality suffers even more) this is useful as many artists use dropped tuning or the pitch was changed in the studio (very common with the Beatles). The trainer has gobs of other stuff, like guitar effects, vocal input, vocal effects, footswitch controllability, adjustable levels in and out etc, etc, etc……But the only two features I use are the two mentioned above. This of course requires me to have a source CD or to burn one from my mp3 collection in order to use the trainer on a song I want to play along with.

Well, when I got my iPod Touch and was shopping the app store for music apps…when… To what to my eyes did appear?
Slow Down Music Trainer.
An app purporting to do exactly what I use my Tascam for, but for the measly price of $9.99 (that’s $89 less than what I paid for my reconditioned Tascam). While this seemed like a great deal, I didn’t want to shell a sawbuck for something that might not work. I didn’t even think to look to see if there was a free or Lite version. I kind of forgot about it, but a week later I was on the app store “app” on the Touch when the Lite version of SDMT came up in a search!
You can load three songs in the lite version (unlimited in the full version). You load songs on the touch via WiFi in a Browser window open on the computer with your music library. Sadly Apple won’t let you do ANYTHING with their music library whether the song is DRM or not (this is why people Jailbreak their iPod’s). You open the app, select the song you want to train on, and get a very simple and useful interface. You have cassette type controls for playback, a tempo slider for slowing down the song, and semi-tone buttons to change the pitch of the playback in half steps. A progress indicator that lets you drag to any point in the song which you can then mark to loopback sections and phrases you want to work on. You can also have the app “count you in” to give you time to get your instrument ready to start playing with the song. In addition, you can "tap tempo" the song to set it to the speed you want to play at in your head.
I played with this app for a couple of days, and the thing that impressed me most was the integrity of the audio. Compared to the noisy and distorted Tascam, there is almost no sonic degradation of the audio quality of the source song when changing the tempo, and very little when changing the pitch (though if you go to the extremes, you’ll notice frequency roll off…but no one would really use it at the extreme slow/low pitch or fast/high pitch settings). It’s pretty funny to make Green Day sound like Barry White, or to make David Bowie sound like Cindy Lauper. While there is no “input” to play along with, any iPod dock will give you sound at a level you can play along with an acoustic guitar or an electric on a low volume setting… or you can do what I did and plug the output of the iPod into one of your amp channels and balance it with the guitar or bass plugged into the other.
Just when I decided it was worth the 10 bucks to get the full version, I used the link button in the app to buy it through the app store… low and behold: the price had been reduced to 99 cents! Now it really was a no-brainer. I like this app so much, I’m thisclose to putting my Tascam on craigslist.
Now, whenever I charge/backup my iPod, I usually go into SDMT and load a couple more songs up to practice. The app is near perfect, and about the only thing it could use is more definition with the pitch control, with maybe a slider to fine tune the pitch instead of just buttons for +/- semitones (a suggestion I sent to the developer).
You know, I wanted the Touch to replace my aged PDA, but I never expected it to also be able to do something this useful… for a buck!
Like their page says: Why would you pay Tascam $200 for their MP3 trainer that only holds 240 songs when you can have the most useful features of the Tascam on a device you already own for a buck? (I would have paid the 10 bucks).

Cool-ero