DANIEL PAGE I am a guitar teacher, and Transcribe is the best software I have found to learn difficult songs. The key part of transcribe, which none of the reviewers have mentioned so far, is the ability to create song markers of 3 types: Section, Measure, and Beat. You do this by tapping the keyboard to the beat (although I don't use the beat markers, just the section and measure) while listening to the song one time through. You can then, using keyboard shortcuts, navigate to any section of the song, so that you can quickly move around. Slow-down software is no longer a big deal, Quicktime Player lets you slow down and change pitch for free, but have you ever tried to move to the guitar solo of a song in quicktime? Drag and drop the playhead, hit fastforward, then rewind, however you do it, it is going to take a lot of time. The marker system in transcribe lets me work easily twice as fast on transcribing, and probably faster. There are also controls for many different types of playing/pausing. For example, there is a button that will start playback for as long as it is held down, and when you pick it up, it will return to the marker that it started at (great for figuring out a particularly hard part). There are different controls for pausing, whether you want it to go back to the marker, or just pause in place. Also, you can navigate to the next beat, measure, or section marker using three different controls. It is, in fact, a dizzying variety of controls at first, but after using it to transcribe a song, you will be unable to go back and use anything else. Extremely well thought out design for transcription. The slow-down quality is quite good. Now, the one thing that people have complained about so far is the interface. It is, by modern mac standards, pretty harsh to look at. Doesn't have the textured, shaded feel that we come to expect, and uses some pretty funky old-school icons. This isn't a problem once you are up and running with the program, in fact, the whole point of the program is to be able to control the entire transcription process from the keyboard, but it is a pain when you are starting out learning the program. There is a great help file, and key commands, but none of them are presented in a modern mac-like way, it is all old school windows style. I rate the program at 5 stars, because the pros of the problem absolutely outweigh the cons, by far. Also, when contacting the developer, I have talked to a competent, thoughtful, human being, who was very receptive to my input for the program (and even to maybe revamping the interface in the future). Highly recommended program for musicians... in fact, I can't imagine being a musician these days and not having the program.
(Version 7.5)
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