From Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:

This sweetly intuitive program for ear-playing musicians slows down the tune without altering the pitch and/or plays the tune in any key you like.

Crooked & complicated melody, complex ornamentation, blistering speed?

With this you can tune it to your instrument, slow it down, isolate the tricky parts, put them on loops and play along with them over and over until you get it right.

And marvel at how inventive and agile your favorite jazzmen/fiddlers/pipers/bluesmen/etc. could and can be.

If you play like this, I need say very little more: this is our wet dream, as big an invention as written music or the phonograph.

Works directly from the CD drive, or with any MP3/AIFF/Wave/AAC/M4A files on your HD; iTunes friendly; originally written for the Mac, now available for Windows as well.

Download the demo and see how it works: I believe you'll agree that the $45 price is an excellent value.

I used to pay much more for those clunky old Marantzes that were nowhere near as useful and then broke.

This cool tool has opened a whole realm of hard tunes to me.

It's that social thing — you need to play with people who are better than you, but you really don't want to waste the patience of good musicians by making them to go over that tricky part for you again.

It's relaxing to let the machine do the machine work, and relaxing makes for good music.

The program is frequently upgraded, and upgrades are always free. (There's a note about "major upgrades may entail a slight fee", but the OSX version was free to people who'd bought classic.)

A couple of times I had to email for help and was fixed up immediately apparently by the program's author, a Swedish musician and programmer named Rolf.

-- Tim Jennings

Amazing Slow Downer

$45

Available from ronimusic

[via Tim Jennings and Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools]