AudioLobe - 4.3

For $20 Audiolobe provides you with: The ability to slow down an audio without changing its pitch. This means you can practice with a play-along recording as slowly as you need, at first. You can then increase the tempo up to normal speed as you progress--even boost the tempo for additional practice, all without changing the key. It also allows you to change the pitch in semi-tone increments. This means you can practice with one play-along recording in all 12 sounding keys at any tempo you like. Fantastic! It also has Bass, Treble, Balance, and Volume controls to customize the play-along to your particular needs. I have made suggestions for material improvements to John Dufty, the designer, and he was highly receptive to them, indicating that he intended to work on them very soon, right after his current project is completed. These improvements include: (1) The ability to record one's own performance over the play-along with sound-on-sound tracks so that a musician or student can evaluate one's performance; (2) The ability to record sound-on-sound with altered tempo, pitch, and balance settings, and with volume controls for each track in playback; (3) replacing the bass and treble sliders with a 10- or 12-band equalizer with pre-amp slider; and (4) enabling the musician or student to access Audiolobe directly from within iTunes, so that iTunes' display abilities can be used to select the audio clips. This is already a great program--worth well beyond the $20. With the new enhancements it will become absolutely TERRIFIC tool for Musicians and Music Students. Best $20 I ever spent on a music-related item.

Seriously, this is the stupidest thing I have come across in years. You barely have time to adjust a single control to make any kind of intelligent evaluation. Avoid this like the plague. It doesn't deserve attention. There are much better things out there.

Offers no support for exporting, so there is no way to save the changes you have made to make the files usable elsewhere. Also, customer support stinks, I emailed requesting a refund when not satisfied with the program only to informed, "thats a great idea, the ability to export, we plan that for future releases" which as we know does not help me right now. DO NOT BUY, THERE ARE TONS OF FREEWARE THAT DO ALL THIS AND MORE!!!

I agree with a previous review that 20 seconds is too short to allow evaluation. However, in those 20 seconds, I heard weird echo-ey artifacts during "slow-down" that I do not hear when using "the amazing slow-downer". Compared to that program, AudioLobe is much prettier, and costs less. On the other hand, if I'm trying to figure out what notes are part of a complex riff, at around half-speed, the echo added to short notes makes the result almost useless for me. The 1.3 update doesn't fix this issue.

I look forward to hearing how future versions work out -- this program is promising, but doesn't yet earn my registration dollars.

20 seconds? A 20 second evaluation? Are you kidding me? When you make this demo limitaion something realistic, come back and I'll retract this: Laughable.