Slowing Down tunes and looping parts of them for practicing

I remember those days a music student was advised to buy a cassette player with a speed /pitch control (I think I remember marantz made one of these, bingo I found one here, exactly as how I remember) knob so one could slow down tunes to transcribe them (or at least the "difficult" parts).

One of the biggest drawbacks of course was that by slowing down you also altered the pitch. Logically lowering to half speed made the "music" sound an octave lower! In practice it became a transposition exercise at the same time :-). Not very confortable. These days are gone (I am glad they are), since the slowing down can now be done by your computer!

One of the free tools that just does this is BestPractice.

BestPractice is capable of the following:

- Slow down and speed up the music
- Alter the pitch (so you don't have to tune your guitar down for those
Hendrix Tunes that require that)
- Loop between given points (just click begin and start point)
- Open CD's, wave files, mp3 files...

- Etc...

Artifacts (echoing effect) can be heard when slowing down, but I have the impression the creator still updates the product.

Here is the link to the programmers page with the (and I repeat myself) free download.

Have fun!