Slow down, stay in key
Slow down music without terrible sound quality- the latest audio stretching from Signalsmith Stretch keeps audio clear as clear as possible instead of smearing it.
SlowBird ♫
Music transcription software for macOS. Built by jazz musicians for jazz musicians.
- Slow music down without changing the pitch, for detailed transcription and play-along practice.
- Manage and curate an entire collection of solos in one place, and learn from the greats.
- Easily create custom highlighted notes to keep track of your favourite lines and excerpts.
Supports macOS 14 or later
A complete transcription environment
SlowBird features everything you need to transcribe music by ear all in one place.
Instead of opening and saving clumsy files alongside your audio, just select the song you want to work on from the sidebar and get right into it.
You can slow down the song, transpose, change the fine tuning make markers and custom notes become loopable excerpts from the music - perfect for saving a library of licks or patterns that you want to bring into your playing.
Expand your vocabulary with the Notes feature
Keep all of your favourite lines to close to hand by adding 'Notes'.
For example, you might want to study just the bridge of 'Anthropology' to see how Bud Powell played it from chorus to chorus.
The rest of the toolkit
Pitch heat map
Highlight a bar and use the keyboard's pitch information analyser to help figure out tricker sections.
Seamless looping
Create a seamless loop at any point in the track and save loops as notes to practice later.
Transpose, keep the tempo
Transpose music into different keys without changing the tempo.
Fine tuning so that you can tune the record to your instrument.
Panning
Some records have instruments panned left or right so you can isolate channels for more specific tasks.
A library, not a folder
Search across tune, soloist and instrument, and colour-label the set you are working through this month. Speed, pitch, loops and notes are remembered per track.
Hold a reference note
Unfold the seven-octave keyboard and press a key: it sustains for as long as you hold it, so you can match a note against the record by ear instead of guessing. Drag up or down while holding to ride its volume.
Five-band EQ
Cut the mud out of a dusty transfer or lift a buried bass line. The heat map follows the EQ, so it shows what you hear.
Zoom to the phrase
Pinch or scroll to zoom around the pointer, right down to individual attacks, with peaks recomputed at full resolution as you go.
Easily mark sections
Drop numbered markers on the head, each chorus, the bridge, and jump straight to any of them with 1–9.
Useful Keybindings
Everything has a key: space to play, [ and ] to set the loop, ⌘↑ to transpose, M to mark.
A quiet experience
Designed to be a good old-fashioned app that helps you get stuff done.
Whatever you play, the job is the same
Slow the record down, loop the phrase, keep what you are working on. How that plays out differs by instrument — each of these pages walks through it for yours.
Guitar
Transcribe solos by ear: slow the fast runs, loop the licks, keep every one you are learning.
Bass
Hear buried lines clearly — slow down, lift an octave, EQ the low end out of the mud.
Piano
Work out voicings with the pitch heat map and drill each section at your own speed.
Drums
Turn a blurred fill into countable strokes with click-free loops at half speed.
Vocals
Learn phrasing in the original key, or transpose the whole track to your range.
Coming from Transcribe!?
A fair, factual comparison with the long-standing tool this niche knows best.
A practice session, start to finish
- Bring in the record. Drop the file on the window, name the tune, the soloist and the instrument you are transcribing and Slow Bird will keep it organised.
- Select a region. You can also drop a numbered marker on the playhead, and jump using the number keys.
- Loop the phrase. Drag across the four bars that are giving you trouble. They loop straight away — adjust an edge, or nudge it by 100 ms, until the loop breathes where the phrase does.
- Take the speed down. Pull it back to 60 %, or 40 % for a double-time run. The key does not move, so what you learn slow is what you play fast.
- Check yourself against the heat map. Stuck on one interval? Open the keyboard and see which pitches actually carry the passage.
- Name it and keep it. Save the region as a note. Next session it is still on the waveform, still looped, still waiting — and you start where you stopped instead of hunting for the spot again.
Questions
Does SlowBird slow music down without changing the pitch?
Yes — that is its core job. Playback runs from 5% to 200% of speed while the key stays put, through a modern time-stretcher that keeps fast lines articulate. Pitch is a separate control: transpose in semitones or trim by cents, and the tempo never moves.
Does it transcribe the music for me?
No, and nothing does this well for dense, real-world recordings. SlowBird is a player built for transcribing by ear: it makes the recording easy to slow, loop and navigate, and its pitch heat map shows the likely notes — but your ear names the notes.
What audio formats does it accept?
MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, AIFF, FLAC and CAF. Drop files or a folder on the window and SlowBird copies them into its own library; your original files are never moved or changed.
Is there a Windows or iPhone version?
No — SlowBird is a native Mac app, built for macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon and Intel. Being native to one platform is part of why it feels quick.
How is it different from Transcribe!?
Transcribe! is the long-standing tool in this niche and has lots of different features — video, chord guessing, foot pedals, Windows and Linux.
However SlowBird does the core ear-learning workflow with a built-in library and saved, named passages, in a modern Mac interface with no learning curve. There is a full comparison at slow-bird.com/vs/transcribe/.
Does it work offline?
Completely. The app makes no network calls and sends no telemetry; your library lives in your own Application Support folder and playback needs no connection.
How do I get it?
Just click the Download for Mac button on this page!
Get SlowBird ♫
A modern Mac app for slowing down music and transcribing jazz solos by ear. Build up a collection of solos, licks and phrases.
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
- Apple silicon & Intel
- MP3 · M4A · AAC · WAV · AIFF · FLAC · CAF