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Originally Posted by SunnyDee
I looked at the website for this, but I'm confused about what it actually does. It shows you a waveform, slows it down without changing pitch, lets you mark the track with text. Is it different than what Audacity does somehow?
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Audacity can do some of that too. It is just easier in Transcribe! because the software was optimized for that, where Audacity is general audio editing software that happens to also have the ability to slow down a passage of music.
Also, with Transcribe! you can download a video from, say, Youtube that has a tune you want to learn. You see the person playing guitar, fingers on the fretboard as the person plays. You can slow down the video with Transcribe! just as easily and it will remain in sync with the audio so you can see exactly what the person is doing. Setting the loop area and slowing it down is the same whether working with strictly audio or a video that has audio. Also, Transcribe! has a number of tools built in that are specifically for learning a tune by ear, such as a nice EQ section so you can focus on just the bass line or just the melody or make the recording clearer or whatever.
With Transcribe! you can save all the metadata of your session. Then, you can just click on that file and Transcribe! will come up exactly as you left it last, with whatever loop points you had, and running the song file that you had loaded.
Another thing Transcribe! has is the ability to set various markers. So I can set section markers at the end of phrases, making it easy for me to find them again.
I could go on, but the main idea is the Transcribe! is a very mature and inexpensive piece of software that is used all over the world by folks learning songs by ear, professional transcribes, etc. The software has been optimized specifically for this and nothing else, instead of being for some other purpose and just happening to have some of functions that are good for figuring out stuff by ear.
Audacity is also a very mature piece of software, since it has been around for a long time too. However, it is not optimized for just one purpose as Transcribe! is. Audacity can do a lot more general audio stuff than Transcribe! can, but Transcribe!'s only purpose is as a tool for learning tunes by ear off recordings. Its interface is optimized for that, as is its workflow.
There are folks using Audacity for this purpose, but I just found it a bit clunky for that specific purpose. Since I do this sort of activity often, it was worth the minimal cost for me to get Transcribe!. Everyone has to decide its value for themselves.
I would suggest you try Audacity and get familiar with the process of learning by ear using software. If you decide you would like to try Transcribe!, you can download the demo version and see if it offers anything of value for you over Audacity. You only have to spend the money if you decide you want to buy it. You may find that you like Audacity's workflow for learning tunes and stay with that.
Tony