Slow Down Music
Slow down any song. Train your ear, not your patience.
Capo plays any song anywhere from 25% to 150% speed without touching the pitch, so you can practice along with the record at a tempo you can actually play. When a solo or passage moves too fast to follow, slow it down until every note is clear, then work your way back up to full speed.
Learn more and try the Free Edition
Capo vs. basic speed controls
Studio-grade time stretching
A browser's speed changer lets you hear podcasts at 1.5x, or a lecture at 0.75x. But music is harder than speech, and you can hear it: notes smear together, and the track takes on an echo. Capo uses the mastering-grade stretching you'd find in professional DAWs, tuned for ear learning.
Start exactly where you need to
Using Capo's Transcription Playhead and Markers, you can start playback precisely before the notes you're trying to decode. But there's only one way to set your place in the YouTube player, and finding the right spot means clicking the timeline until you get lucky.
Stop notes in their tracks
Hit pause in any player and you get silence—the chord you were chasing is simply gone. Drag across the waveform and Capo's Audio Freezer hangs on to that note or chord instead, so you can hear exactly what's ringing out. Handy for identifying notes, or hearing where Markers should go.
I've been using Capo quite a bit to slow down music and decipher what's happening in my favorite songs. That's how I would pick up music when I was younger: I would slow down vinyl to figure out what they were doing. Now you can actually loop it and keep the original key of the song!
Capo allows me to slow things down and to loop, and also with the pitch and speed quality it's incredible.
Capo is an invaluable learning tool. I use it to loop hard phrases, and slow them down with very few artifacts, making them easy to master!
Chromeo
Drummer for Santana, George Duke, Mike Stern
Guitarist for Chris Cornell, Courtney Love
However fast you need it
Nobody nails a fast solo in one pass. You drop the speed, loop a few bars until you play them clean, and creep the tempo up until you've got it down cold.
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Set the exact speed
Drag the speed control anywhere from 25% to 150%, and nudge it in steps of 1% while you're playing along. Come back for another pass at a slightly faster speed once the solo starts to click.
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Loop the hard part
Snap a region to the beat around the phrase you're stuck on, and practice with it on a loop so you can repeat it as many times as it takes, at whatever speed you've set.
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Keep the beat
Add a metronome synced to the song's tempo, so a slowed-down bass line still feels like it's in time, instead of floating.
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Change the key at the same time
Speed and pitch are independent controls. Slow a song down to work out a fast-moving vocal line while also transposing to match your range. For a recording that's slightly detuned, or an instrument you can't retune, fine-tune the pitch in cents until it lands.
Stop losing your place every time you hit play
When you're learning a solo, you're doing a lot of this: playing the song, stopping after a few notes, and trying to find them on your instrument. When you forget the notes, you start all over again. That's why we built the Transcription Playhead. Every press of play starts at the note you're working on, not wherever you happened to stop.
For advanced setups
Your foot takes over playback speed—assign a MIDI expression pedal and your hands stay on the fretboard or the keys, right through a phrase, with no stopping to reach for a control.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does slowed music in Capo sound better than YouTube or other web apps?
Because the playback speed control in a browser isn't built for music—it's a general-purpose engine that mostly plays speech, and on music you hear it as an echo-like smearing where individual notes stop being distinct.
Capo uses a mastering-grade time-stretching engine built for music and used in professional DAWs. On top of that, Capo tunes it for transcription specifically—it takes extra care to preserve the transients, so you still hear the attack of every note. Slowed down, the recording still sounds like music.
How slow can Capo go?
Capo plays audio anywhere from 25% to 150% of the original speed. Half speed is usually enough to hear what a part is doing; at quarter speed a blazing-fast solo takes four times as long to go by, and you can hear every note in it.
Do I have to pay to slow songs down?
No. The Free Edition includes Capo's slowing feature in full, and your speed setting is saved with the project. What it doesn't include is saving your edits to chords or beats, exporting audio, or—on the Mac—exporting MIDI and creating a lead sheet.
Will slowing a song down change its pitch?
No. However slow you go, the song stays in its original key—speed and pitch are separate controls in Capo, and moving one leaves the other alone.
That also means you can move the pitch on purpose when you want to: transpose the song into a key that suits your voice, or nudge the tuning to fix a recording that wasn't quite at A440.
Does slowing down music hurt the audio quality?
Some, at the extremes—but far less than you're used to. Below 50%, most tools start revealing artifacts: notes go blurry, and cymbals and consonants smear into an echo. At 25% Capo's playback is slower, not mangled—you can still tell a slide from a bend.
Can I control Capo's speed hands-free?
Assign an expression pedal (or any continuous MIDI control) to playback speed and you can move anywhere between 25% and 150% without taking your hands off the instrument. Add switches to step the playhead back or forward a beat at a time, or to start and stop playback outright.
Is slowing down available on both Mac and iOS?
Yes, and it works the same way on both. A few advanced tools are Mac-only—the spectrogram-based Tabbing view, for one—but slowing, looping, and chord detection are identical across platforms, and your playback settings (speed included) follow you between devices.
What makes Capo different from the other "slow downer" or audio speed changer apps?
Three things: quality, analysis capabilities, and a free edition that you can actually learn songs with.
Capo is professional audio software—high-quality playback, low latency, serious signal processing. Its audio engine has more in common with a DAW than most slowing apps. It's been on the Mac since 2009, and won an Apple Design Award along the way.
It also listens to songs. Capo works out the key of a song and gives you a real head start on the chords, so you're playing sooner instead of hunting for the changes by ear. Most apps in this category just play audio slowly.
And unlike many other tools, you don't need to pay anything to use its core features. Everything you need to learn a song is available in the Free Edition: slowing, chord finding, key detection, and beat tracking can be used as long as you'd like.
Start with any song
Hear every note, at exactly the speed you need.
Capo uses ZTX PRO Time Stretch/Pitch Shift Technology licensed from Zynaptiq GmbH.
