Play it slowly Manual

About

'Play it slowly' is a tool to help you when practicing or transcribing music. It allows you to play a piece of music at a different speed or pitch.

Package provides two applications:

• playitslowly - UI application based on gtk
• playitslowlycli - console application

Shortcuts

The following keyboard shortcuts exist:

• Alt + P or SPACE: Play/Pause
• Alt + e: Rewind
• CTRL + 1-9: Rewind (x seconds)

Selecting the audio output device

You can select which audiodevice playitslowly uses by passing a gstreamer sink with the --sink commandline parameter.

Example: playitslowly "--sink=alsasink device=plughw:GT10" or playitslowly "--sink=alsasink device=hw:1"

You can also use other sinks than alsa.

Generic Installation

To install use you need to have the following libraries installed:

• Python 2.6 (or 2.5 with simplejson installed)
• PyGTK >= 2.10
• PyGST >= 0.10
• gstreamer >= 0.10 including the soundtouch/pitch element (included in gstreamer-plugins-bad)

Normally these libraries are already installed on your system.

To install play it slowly execute: python setup.py install as superuser (root). If you are using a gnome based system like Ubuntu you can just doubleclick install.sh and select run.

Distribution Specific Installation Hints

Arch Linux

(this could be obsolete by now)

Arch Linux is missing the pitch element, so you'll have to compile yourself:

pacman -S soundtouch
cd /tmp
wget gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/gst-plugins-bad/gst-plugins-bad-0.10.9.tar.gz
tar xzf gst-plugins-bad-0.10.9.tar.gz
./configure --prefix=/usr
cd ext/soundtouch
make && make install

Then test if it worked:

gst-inspect-0.10 soundtouch

Fedora

Install gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras

Mandriva

Install gstreamer0.10-soundtouch.

Ubuntu

It should work out of the box!

Hacking

The source code of play it slowly is hosted on github:

http://github.com/jwagner/playitslowly

If you have any questions or a patch just drop me a mail or fill a pull request on github.

License

Copyright (C) 2009 - 2011 Jonas Wagner

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Bugreports / Questions

If you encounter any bugs or have suggestions or just want to thank me - I would like to hear about it!

Known Issues

• None

Contact

You can reach my by e-mail: veers at gmx dot ch