Capo 3 review: Learning a new song? This Mac app's here to help
Capo is an especially useful tool for musicians wanting to play along with songs residing in their iTunes library. It lets you slow down (or speed up) the tempo of a song without having the pitch of the tune sound as if Alvin the Chipmunk or the Grim Reaper is on lead vocals. But pitch and tempo manipulation is just one of Capo’s handy features. The latest version of Capo for Mac adds automatic chord recognition, allowing you to start strumming almost instantly.
Capo analyzes each measure and marks the beginning of that measure with the chord that seems to dominate the measure.
As soon as you launch Capo, a small square window with a musical note opens on screen, inviting you to drag and drop an audio file onto it. Capo supports MP3, M4A, AIFF, and WAV; it cannot open older DRM-protected files. Once you drop a supported file onto the window, Capo quickly processes the song and opens the main application view, which cleanly presents a vast amount of information about the tune.
Across the top of the window, you see a timeline with the song broken down into measures. Just beneath it is the waveform of the song’s audio. Beneath that, a spectrogram of the audio shows a lot more detail about the music, if you know what you’re looking at.
The spectrogram presents eight octaves’ worth of audio information that lets you see if the guitarist is using vibrato, bending, or sliding into notes, and more. The spectrogram can take some getting used to, however, as distortion and natural harmonics also show up there and can mislead you as you try to distinguish the intricate parts of the song.
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