AudioSnail

If you wish to learn a guitar solo or other musical compositions, you could play an audio track repeatedly while practicing. Although it is a good practicing method, it still has a major flaw. The song's tempo may be too fast, giving you little time to learn the notes. AudioSnail offers an excellent solution for this issue. It allows you to adjust the playback speed of audio tracks, which gives you ample time to hear and process each musical note. The software's playback speed control does not affect the pitch, so you can learn a song in its unaltered state.

AudioSnail is free to try, with some limitations. Its setup file is almost 5 MB and it takes only a few moments to install its core components. The software can be used on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7 and it requires .NET Framework 3.5 or a later version. The hardware requirements are modest, so you can run it even on older systems.

Everything can be done on the same user interface, without navigating through different sections or opening menus on separate windows. You can import audio files, in various formats, from your local folders or tracks from a loaded audio CD. Imported songs are listed in the upper right corner of the window and you can play them like with any other media player.

When you select and play an audio track, the application will display its waveform, along with its title and length. While playing a song, you can move a slider left or right to decrease or increase the playback speed. Although the pitch is not affected, when you change the playback speed, you can still increase it or decrease it, with separate controls. It is also possible to isolate instruments in an audio track. In other words, you can emphasize the sound of a specific instrument, which can help you focus on the bits you are interested in.

To help you further, AudioSnail places a 10-band graphical equalizer at your disposal, which comes with a few presets. Additionally, the software allows you to select a segment from your audio track and play it on a loop. If you wish to play your songs in slow motion with other players or on other devices, you can save the currently playing audio tracks, along with your settings, in MP3 format.