The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

Something useful for the audio folks out there who want to speed up or slow down the playback speed and pitch of audio from CDs, WAVs or MP3s.

What I use BestPractice for:

• Changing the pitch of a music MP3 to change a female voice to a male voice and vice versa - * Most of the time *
• Slowing down music MP3s to try to figure out the lyrics * Rarely *

What I think BestPractice could be used for:

• Speeding up audio books, podcasts slightly to save that little bit of time
• Slowing down language audio books / podcasts when the instructors pronounce phrase

What the creator of BestPractice thinks it can be used for:

From the BestPractice website:

• Your favorite musician plays a solo that you want to study, but you can’t figure it out on normal speed
• You’d like to transcribe music, but need to slow it down to hear it right
• You can tune the song to your instrument instead of the other way around
• You’d like to sing along, but you need to change the key to match your voice
• You’re learning a foreign language and you’d like to slow down the spoken examples
• You’re like me and like to fool around with audio and/or digital signal processing
• You think that playing Celine Dion at rave speed is fun =D

BestPractice also includes a loop function so that you can practice a particular part of a song or repeat a section of an audio book / podcast that you can’t hear clearly.

There’s also a karaoke mode where you can attempt to suppress the vocals in a song but I haven’t had much success with it even after fiddling with the bass and treble pass through frequencies.

© Robert Moreland

BestPractice (currently 1.01) is written by Robert Moreland and the installer (614 KB, Windows only) and sources can be downloaded from his website.