Introduction

Practice# is a tool for practicing a musical instrument with playback music. Basically it is an audio player that allows changing tempo (i.e. speed) and pitch in real time.

Use it daily and it will turn your playing skills sharper!

Practice# can be used for:

Practicing a musical instrument (e.g. Guitar, singing) with playback music. For example: Repeating a slowed down complex solo part until you perfect it.
Listening to pod casts - slower or faster than the original tempo and/or with a different pitch (higher or lower voice).

Practice# was designed as a practical tool, therefore it is minimalistic and doesn't have features that would bloat it. There are minimal menus, two dialog windows (one of them is the About dialog), and in general all possible actions are shown on the main screen in an intuitive and direct way. Keyboard shortcuts allow even easier and immediate control, than using a mouse.

Features

Playback of the following formats:

MP3, WAV, WMA, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC

Speed change - The ability to slow down or speed up music without changing its pitch
Pitch change - The ability to change the pitch of music up or down without changing its speed. New! (1.4.6) - Accurate half semi-tone increments
Loops - Start and End Marker with Cue (waiting a few seconds before the loop starts, useful to get hands back into position)
Persistent Presets - The biggest difference currently between Practice# and the other tools out there. In fact, that is why this tool was written by me in the first place.

When you practice some song over and over for a while it is extremely useful to have some presets of your practice habits for this song. For example: One preset can be for the intro and one for the verse or two presets can be for the solo - one regular speed and one slowed down to 75% with a cue of 2 seconds.

Cross Windows Platform - Runs on all latest Windows Operating systems, Tested on Windows XP Pro SP3 32 bit, Vista Home Premium 32 Bit & Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.
3 Band Equalizer
New! (1.4.6) - Voice Suppression

Installation

Without an installer

Click the Downloads tab and download the zip that has 'NoInstaller' in its name. Unzip and run the PracticeSharp executable. That's it!

With an installer

Click the Downloads tab and download the zip that has 'WithInstaller' in its name. Unzip and run the setup.

Usage

A youtube video that demonstrates Practice# usage:

Design Documentation

I wrote a CodeProject article that explains the architecture and some of the design decisions for this project.

Changes Log

See all changes in ChangesLog

Credits

Practice# is using other Open Source libraries:

NAudio - http://naudio.codeplex.com (MS-PL)
SoundTouch - http://www.surina.net/soundtouch (LGPL)
Vorbis# (csvorbis) - https://github.com/mono/csvorbis (LGPL)
Some ideas are based on DragonOgg - https://sourceforge.net/projects/dragonogg/ (LGPL)
WMA playback support is based on a Code Project article by Idael Cardoso - "C# Windows Media Format SDK Translation", http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/ManWMF.aspx

Note: The NAudio WMA support was originally part of Practice# but was incorporated into NAudio on 11/26/2010

FLAC playback supportis based on libFlac (http://flac.sourceforge.net/) (BSD)

and based on some .NET Interop code by Stanimir Stoyanov (http://stoyanoff.info/blog/2010/07/26/decoding-flac-audio-files-in-c/)

WiX - The Windows Installer XML (WiX) http://wix.codeplex.com/ (Common Public License Version 1.0)
dotNetInstaller - setup bootstrapper for Windows, http://dotnetinstaller.codeplex.com (MIT)

Feedback

If you have any comments, problems, suggestions or just like the tool please let me know! There is an Issues tab that allows reporting of issues/requests/etc. Enjoy and practice sharply!

Yuval

License

LGPL - Support Open Source!