SlowPlay is a simple audio player with speed/pitch change capabilities, based on GStreamer. It is meant to help music students/teachers transcribe music and play along with it.
This software is heavily inspired, although not forked, by Play It Slowly by Jonas Wagner.
I've been using Play It Slowly as my music classes companion for ages, but unfortunately it is no longer mantained and I started experiencing problems since I've updated my laptop OS, so I decided to rewrite it.
Thank you Jonas for your work.
SlowPlay can speed down/up songs or change their pitch independently "on the fly". It is possible export modified songs by using the "Save as..." button.
You can import the most common audio files format (mp3, wav, flac, aif...). You can save your files either in mp3 or wav format, based on the extension of file to be saved. Currently saved audio files are in the format of 44.1K 16bit stereo. Mp3 are saved as variable bitrate quality=4. Volume setting and metadata are ignored in the export operation.
This software is my very first attempt to write "serious" Python code, so it may not look strictly pythonic to the purists, I apologize for that. I was born with C and quit my job as software developer many years ago, so not only I'm not a Python dev but I am also an obsolete dev! :)
Having said that, Slowplay is still at its early test stage, I had not the possibility to test it on many computers, so don't expect it to work on your system right out of the box. Please report problems, I can try to address them with your help.
Please download the slowplay[version-num].tar.gz from the latest release. Extract it on a folder that can be reached by your path (tipically /opt or ~/.local/bin) and run the executable file slowplay
For SlowPlay to work you need to have GStreamer along with Soundtouch plugins. While GStreamer is probably installed by default on your Linux box, you probably have to manually install the gstreamer-plugins-bad package. Please refer to your Linux distribution for the installation.
SlowPlay offers the following shortcuts:
CTRL+q: Quit application
The following commands are used to control playback and they're all assigned to the numeric keypad. Refer to the drawing below for visual help.
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0: Toggle Play/Pause
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.: Stop and Rewind
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HOME: Rewind
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1: Rewind 5 seconds
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4: Rewind 10 seconds
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7: Rewind 15 seconds
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3: Forward 5 seconds
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6: Forward 10 seconds
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9: Forward 15 seconds
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8: Increase speed by 5%
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2: Decrease speed by 5%
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5: Reset speed to 100%
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+: Transpose +1 semitone
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-: Transpose -1 semitone
(please make sure none of the input boxes have the focus. Click on an empty area of the app to take the focus back from an input box):