Capo for Mac

2.0 stars

"An audio player with special functions and a high price"

April 30, 2010  |   By nicholls108

Version: Capo 1.1.4

Pros

The ability to vary speed and pitch as well as setting markers and looping while playing are hard-to-find functions on the Mac. Capo does all of this well with the added bonus of being able to save settings.

Cons

Capo does what it promises but it's not worth $49 (payable after 5 minutes of use). And it's far from being mature yet. Musicians requiring speed and pitch changes when playing should check out the much less pretentious Finetunes for Mac.

Summary

The following was sent as feedback to the developers. No response was received.

Dear Supermegaultragroovies,

Here's how I feel about Capo:
The comments are derived from some initial experience.

The main part of the display is the pane with the waveform. (A question in passing: What is being displayed, the envelope of the waveform, maximum amplitude of any frequency or sound energy?) Since it has such a big vertical extent, the eyes can only be focussed either on the top curve or the bottom one, not both. The waveform is symmetrical around the horizontal axis, if not in principal, then certainly in practice. So half of it is wasted. It only makes sense to display both top and bottom halves, if they are small and can be seen together. So please either halve (or more) the vertical extent or remove the bottom half. This will free up some valuable screen real estate which, depending on the zoom level and volume of sound, is mostly black anyway - see next comment.

The most important function for me is the use of markers. But with a dozen or more markers in a long track, navigation becomes messy. I find myself writing down the position and purpose of markers! On paper! You've tried to get around this with a hierarchy of marker types but this doesn't work for me in practice. I need to be able to label each marker with a few words of text and to navigate to it at will. For this, a pull-down goto control will be good and, following the above suggestion, there will be plenty of space available. When you consider the importance of this function and the markers only get a few millimetres of space above the timeline! I admit that finding a way to display the labels might be a challenge, maybe with flags whose poles have different lengths.

I dislike the 'played time' display. The flickering sub-minute digits have a restless, disturbing effect on me which is unnecessary. And I have a physical disability which prevents me from cognising images at a rate of one thousand per second or more, so those digits are wasted on me. You have simulated hard-wired, electronic displays - hey this is software! The following suggestion will be trivial to implement: When a track is playing, blank out the decimal point and the three following digits. And display said digits in a smaller font.

I couldn't find anything about the zoom slider in Help. The symbols at its two ends are not appropriate: They wrongly imply I can change the waveform amplitude. In fact the slider compresses and expands the waveform. Its behaviour at the right-hand end is strange: Trying to drag the knob further than the right hand stop expands the waveform to the sub-second level. (Please don't remove this - I find it useful.) Instead, you would need to have a toggle switch which displays the sub-second level, de-activating the slider. But the slider is not the right control here because tracks can have a duration ranging from a few seconds to hours. A choice control will be better with the discrete options (depending on track length): whole track / 10 minutes / 1 minute / 10 seconds / 1 second.

The Voice Reduction function doesn't seem to work on files with a very low coding frequencies. Instead of just not performing the function in this case, the function should be de-activated, e.g. by being greyed out.

At the beginning (end) of a track the rewind (fast forward) button should be greyed out.

What is the curve displayed in the Voice Reduction field? (It's very difficult to see, grey on black.) If it's frequency distribution, I'd like to see it (clearly!) in a separate field.

I need to know at what frequencies the individual sliders in the equaliser are located. I appreciate that you are trying to stop the display becoming cluttered, a laudable goal, so if you don't want to insert labels, at least mouse-over tool tips are necessary.

I believe that you have got the layout of controls wrong. When you consider that you have three groups of controls: playback options, view options and navigation, you might come to agree with me. For example, the speed and pitch controls, instead of being hidden in black, should have the same status as the volume control.

Why do you avoid Preferences? I don't believe you will be able to do it for long. There are many aspects which should be customisable.

A minor bug (you may not agree that it's a bug): When a Capo window is closed, the associated file doesn't seem to be released correctly because it's not possible to modify the file with another app or to delete it until Capo is quitted.

I hope these comments are useful. Don't get me wrong: I believe this is a great little app. Please help me feel that it's worth the $50 I paid for it.

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(I'm using Capo version 1.1.4 (1010.49.0) with Mac OS X 10.6.3.)

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