

Capo: My new Mac app for helping musicians learn their music - liscio
http://capoapp.com

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anigbrowl
It's not worth $39, certainly not $49. I haven't even used it, just looked at
your web page: but I have a strong professional background in this area, so I
know what it does.

There are many shareware programs which do this, and others are free: this
goes double for plugins, and there's a better than-even chance that a musician
who likes computers already has some kind of multitrack software which
accomodates plugins. They likely also have a hardware audio interface with a
special low-impedance input for plugging in a guitar and got equivalent
software for free. So that's black mark #1 - you're not offering much new
functionality.

Black mark #2 is your interface. It is beautifully clean, I applaud that.
However, while an audio waveform is wonderful for engineers, it's not so much
for musicians. It might be better to generate a low-resolution spectral
display, by applying (say) a 256-band FFT which won't cause any computer to
break a sweat but would give a more musically meaningful presentation, and set
you apart from the competition. As you have already implemented pitch-
independent time stretching, you probably know how to do this.

Personally, I would not waste so much space on the album art either, but
that's me.

I'd like to see you add some more features, which wouldn't break your
interface. While decomposing a a piece of music into polyphonic pitch
information is hard (see <http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=635> for
the technology leader), deriving the 8key* of the music from a relatively
coarse FFT analysis is not so difficult. Having the key signature, and indeed
the bpm, appear on the left side or over blocks in the audio display should be
easily achievable and would add a lot of value.

Another thing you could do is offer a button to extract or remove the top
(usually vocal) melody line. This is easy: take a stereo file, invert one
channel, and add it to the other. this will give you a (mono) karaoke track,
since the vocals are almost always panned to the center. You'll lose the kick
drums and bass too, but you could limit to the bandwidth of the human voice.
Invert and add the karaoke channel to both sides of the stereo waveform, and
you'll get _only_ the center, allowing the musician to either copy or
accompany the lead vocal and not much else. There's nothing more complex than
a multiply-add operation going on here
((waveform.position.leftchannel.samplevalue * -1) +
waveform.position.rightchannel.samplevalue ...etc.) so you should be able to
do this in realtime with virtually no performance hit.

Finally, consider taking the live stream of input from the microphone input
(eg the guitar), FFting it, and doing a loose correlation with the FFT of the
playing track to derive a little 'accuracy' meter. Of course there will be
much more audio information in the track unless it's also an acoustic guitar
solo, but the frequency response of the live input should be a subset of this
as long as the musician is playing in time. When they start to drag or lead
the backing track, the energy of individual frequency bins will exceed those
of the backing track.

Sorry for being so harsh, but I do think you're asking too much for something
that most people will perceive as little more than a 'hello world' audio
program. If I were you I would protoype the functionality in reaktor or some
other visual-programming tool, add some more useful and unusual modes of
display or operation as above, and then bring that back to your clean
interface.

~~~
liscio
If I was worried about harsh comments, I wouldn't have started a thread, on
the internet, looking for feedback. Anyway...

You bring up some interesting features—a few of which I have planned for
future releases. I can't do it all in a 1.0 release, though. Someone with a
"strong professional background" should be well aware that getting to a 1.0 is
the toughest part of the battle.

I obviously plan to add far more functionality going forward, and you can rest
assured that I have some amazing stuff up my sleeves.

Whether my customers perceive the application as a "Hello World" audio program
(which I strongly disagree with, by the way) is a whole other story.

I don't think they care what's under the hood as long as it meets their needs,
and does it better than anything else, and with ease. Many of the customers
I've shown Capo to have never even known that time-pitch correction was
possible, for instance. I can't fathom a user looking at my software and
claiming, "Hey, I can code that in a weekend."

However, looking at any of the other solutions, I'm sure users would be
intimidated. I want to bring this mature technology to a user base that isn't
really interested in opening up a myriad of plugins and digging through
complex UI.

No, these users want to be playing a song in iTunes, realize they should try
and learn the song, and drag the song onto the Capo dock icon and start
learning right away. That "simple" feature alone cost me about a month of off-
and-on experimentation and hacking.

And, I was nice enough to share the solution to that problem on my blog for
all to see, so that folks like you can make your "Hello World" solutions that
much more quickly.

However, once you get to Capo's 1.0 state, I can assure you that you'll be far
behind, eating my dust...

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liscio
I've been a full-time indie Mac developer since Feb 2008, and this is the
third product in my Mac products lineup.

It's not the same kind of 'startup' that you folks tend to talk about (not a
hosted service, in the cloud, etc), but it's what I do for a living.

Questions about the business, the tech, the features, etc.? I'll gladly answer
them here.

~~~
mtinkerhess
Pitch and speed adjustment are useful features for learning music from
recordings, but Audacity has those for free. Are the features your program
offers over Audacity (marking sections, drag-and-drop importing) there for
convenience or do they allow you to do things that aren't possible in other
audio programs?

~~~
liscio
I think this comes down to really "living with the app for a while" to make
that decision.

I've used other apps, including other 'slow-downers', and I really just
couldn't find my footing in them. Some are horrid cross-platform apps with
unfortunately chosen keystrokes, and pretty much all of them had terrible UIs.

After using them, I decided to write Capo. It was a need that, in my opinion,
just wasn't being met.

I wrote an app that can run on your laptop, with your guitar on your lap, and
you can control it very quickly and figure out a song with no fuss. I take
guitar lessons weekly, and this app scratches my itch beautifully.

You don't have to visit deep menus, fancy settings panels, or anything out of
the way to accomplish the main task which Capo does very well.

I hope this answers your question (albeit in a very wordy, roundabout way).

~~~
mechanical_fish
As a banjo player, let me testify: Slow downers are really useful, and they
really need to be driveable using only your left hand, because there are these
big fingerpicks on most of the fingers of your right hand. It's really hard to
shake hands with a banjo player.

So the UI thing is quite important. Maybe even important enough to make me
spend money on a _second_ slow downer. ;)

~~~
zzzmarcus
What's the first slow downer you use? I'm a banjo player as well but haven't
found a good way on a mac to slow Scruggs to the point where I can distinguish
his notes.

Capo looks amazing, but if I'm going to drop consider dropping 40 bucks I want
to compare :)

~~~
liscio
You really should download and use the free trial to decide for yourself. In
fact, all the slow-downers on the market have free trials.

In Capo, you have all the functionality you need, with the limitation that
after 5 minutes of audio pass through for a given song, audio quality will
begin to degrade.

Learn a handful of songs with Capo, a handful with the others, and let me know
(use the Feedback item in the Help menu) how it went!

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Jasber
This is great.

How difficult would it be to detect the notes that are being played by the
bass? This would be useful for someone who is new to playing by ear and
soloing.

For example, you pickup that the bass progression is G A D C--that makes
figuring out the correct chords (and notes for soloing) even easier.

~~~
liscio
It's not difficult to detect all the notes via FFT, slightly more difficult to
detect only bass notes (harmonics come into play), and quite a bit more
difficult to pull useful chords out.

That said, my first Mac app, FuzzMeasure, is an audio analysis tool---so I
know my way around the FFT/etc. Read into this comment however you please. ;)

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kjell
I picked up Capo while it was in beta for $9. I bought it after about 30
seconds of playing with it. Loved everything about it. I'd previously scorned
the use of slow-downers as a crutch, and more recently given in to Audacity
for figuring out the blistering stuff that I'd never have been able to learn
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoRRjEZaN1M>).

Its interface was the leading factor. It just worked, looked nice, made me
feel good. Capo outranks audacity for speed–bending ten-fold. When the $40/50
price was announced I was however very glad I'd heard about it ahead of 1.0
and snuck into the beta program.

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gabrielroth
The interface looks lovely -- I'm sure I'll download the demo at some point
when I next pick up my guitar.

I'd be interested to hear your thinking when it came to setting the price.

~~~
liscio
Capo is selling to a market that includes folks who (and I'm included) would
easily throw an extra $100 into a guitar because it has a nice rosewood back &
sides versus mahogany.

That $100 isn't going to help you play any better. It'll make you sound
different, but it isn't improving your ability to play. The same can be said
for buying a $30 guitar strap, quick-release pins for $20, a pedal for $80,
etc...

For $50 (as of July 1), Capo _will_ help you play better, and using it
regularly will make you a better overall musician. So will the other tools,
which also cost $50.

My reasoning is probably quite similar to why they're priced the way they are
--it is a seriously helpful tool to those that need it, and it is worth the
money.

Now, why do I think someone would choose Capo over the other tools? I think
Capo is easier to use, more well-integrated with iTunes, performs very well,
looks far better, and is generally more Mac-like (see point 1 below). Any one
of these reasons would be a valid reason to choose Capo.

In some respects, one could argue that I should charge more than my
competition based on those 'better' points (see Eric Sink's software pricing
article, for instance). However, Capo is a 1.0 product, and I need to build
Capo's reputation, and a large following of users.

I hope this answers your question (and helps others out there looking for more
discussion about pricing their own products)!

(point 1) The other apps are cross-platform, and have some odd quirks. The UI
isn't quite right in areas, the keyboard shortcuts are strange (to me,
anyway), and behavior isn't always what I'd expect.

~~~
anigbrowl
_Capo is selling to a market that includes folks who (and I'm included) would
easily throw an extra $100 into a guitar because it has a nice rosewood back &
sides versus mahogany._

Yes...but the guitar will be seen/heard on stage. People will generally spend
a lot more on their t-shirt than on their underpants or socks. Nobody with an
interest in musical performance wants to advertise the tedium or difficulties
of musical practice, so because that part isn't glamorous. So don't base your
price point on appealing to the musician's ego about investing in themselves.

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frig
Are you doing naive speed adjustment or taking more of a recycle-esque
approach?

~~~
liscio
I'm using the Apple-supplied time-pitch audio unit because:

(a) it has excellent audio quality (b) it's well-maintained (c) it performs
well; and (d) I don't like to reinvent the wheel :)

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damada2
cool app...downloaded the trial.

