Capo App Reviews

every version of Capo gets worse. i still use the original version for transcribing complicated and long solos by Coltrane, Joe Henderson etc.. version 1 had MARKERS which is an absolutely crucial tool when transcribing long solos. why did that feature have to be removed? the new looping functionality does not replace markers. chord detection is beyond useless. i see that the developers never intended this to be a serious tool for transcription, but it’s just sad because version 1 is still my preferred app for transcribing.

I was introduced to this by a friend and I am really enjoying using it. I do think its excellent as a slow-downer, and tempo finder…. great for learning songs, just the way you might in Transcribe, etc. but better and faster in many ways for me. Im not sure the chord recognition and tablature editor are ready for prime time yet. There are features that maybe I just dont get… some people work differently than I do so maybe they are handy for them. That said, the GUI is fast, intuitive and it sounds better than any program Ive heard while playing back really slow speed! This makes it much easier to pick stuff apart while learning fast runs, etc… THE GREAT!: Sound quality is really good at slow speeds… much better than others… this makes hearing stuff A LOT easier when slowing things down. The EQ and Voice Reduction work nicely in semi-isolating and pin-pointing parts youre trying to hear. Tempo Recognition is really good… at first I didnt think that would matter to me but then realized how nice it is to know the exact tempo… then when charting out stuff… its right there keeping track of measures and beats for me! NICE! Multiple Regions!!!! YAY I was a bit confused at first but totally get it now… you can drag over (and edit by dragging) Multiple regions…. not such a big deal when going through a song from the top and charting out but…. when I want to go back and practice a certain riff etc… its right there selected when I open the file back up … I dont need to spend time finding the spot i need to run.. looping it etc.. In fact… setting up these regions reminds me of stuff I need to look at before a gig! GREAT! THE GOOD: The overall GUI is nice, quick access to helpful things like EQ, MONO, Voice Reduction… these are placed right on front to adjust quickly… accessing them is instant and doesnt freak out playback like some others… Commands are simple and easily learned…. once I used it for a few minutes I was blazing through sections, etc… easy to turn on/off looping etc. THE NOT SO GOOD: As mentioned in other reviews here, the chord recognition is not working that great. I dont think this should even be a feature of this program. Even if you were going to play the dumbed down cowboy chord version of a song, its just not recognizing the chords accurately enough to be useful. That said, I dont need this feature, Im fine figuring out the chords. I WISH you could turn off the chord view in fact… it becomes distracting while Im writing out my own chart…. You also cant print anything so… even if you spent time editing the TAB or chord diagrams… you cant get it out of he program… so sort of useless. Also wish I could zoom the waveform vertically, Theres so much real estate used by the spectrogram, which… isnt useful to me. OVERALL: I will be using it lots… If you ignore certain things, Its simple, fast and to the point. My inclination is that this program is trying too hard to be too many things. What it does well it does really nicely. I think they may be spinning their wheels on some of the other aspects, or at least it needs to be another program altogether. The stuff I dont need I ignore and it works great!

Chord detection is all over the place. I have tried numerous songs in my iTunes library and it has gotten a handful of chords correct. NOT timing. NOT changes. Tabs? Aparently you write them yourself. Spectogram is a complete gimmick. It literally can’t pick up a simple opening to an acoustic song. Be warned, you will still visit google regularly to search for tabs and chords. But hey, spend thirty bucks and you can comlpetely transcribe them over to this crapapp while looking at your guitar on the stand. Asked for refund and got no response. Typical. Ladies and Gents, apps won’t make you guitarists or musicians. Playing music will. Listening to music will as well. I thought this could be a cool app to easily jam along to songs with, while helping me out with some notation. Wrong. Save your money and go learn some Jimi. EDIT** Can we get some development people? This app cost me $30 and hasn’t been touched since day two of having it. Keep up the great work.

I picked this up on the iphone and so Im getting the desktop version. I drop a track in there and it finds my chords quick! great for when Im brainstorming or need inspiration

This program is completely amazing. Ive been waiting for something like this for decades. But dont walk into this purchase without a full understanding of what Capo IS and IS NOT capable of doing. Is Capo going to spit out complete sheet music or tablature for your favorite Dream Theater song or Bach minuet? No. Is the output going to be 100% note-for-note accurate? Of course not! But for $30, you cant expect it to do those things, either! Reality check: If software like that existed, the $350,000,000 US sheet music industry would crumble and die...and I doubt the major players in that industry are going to let that revenue go away easily. Capo WILL give you a solid method for determining the chords for just about any popular song. And it does this well with a VERY simple interface. Single note stuff: not so much. But chords: absolutely brilliant! I play in a few cover bands, and before Capo there were three options for acquiring charts: Option 1: Purchase published sheet music (STUPID expensive...if you can even find the tune you want) Option 2: Use internet tab sites (chock full of user-submitted and generally TERRIBLE charts) Option 3: Figure it out yourself and hope you get the chords right. (This skill comes with time, but it can be very difficult for some people to learn.) Capo has not only helped me to up my game in a BIG way by suggesting chords based on the voicings it hears within the tune, but it is also helping me learn more about complementary chord structures. (Which can help immensely with option #3!) And I cant even FATHOM the logic happening under the covers here. 4 stars because the interface isnt always completely intuitive. (Would give 4.5 stars if I could!) But this software is absolutely incredible. Heres the bottom line: If you want note-perfect results, head over to musicnotes.com (and prepare to pay $5+ per SONG). If you want to roll the dice and hope that hellmasterguitargod69 got it right, check out ultimateguitar.com (fair warning: the odds arent in your favor). But if you want a piece of software that will not only help you determine the more obscure chords in most tunes but also provide validation that the chord choices youve made on your own are correct, then Capo is worth EVERY PENNY. Keep up the good work, developers!

If you’re looking to learn songs in your library that you can’t find chords and tabs for online, this is a must have app. I listen to a lot of artists that don’t have a bunch of tabs/chords available online and I don’t have the best ear for picking out chords. This app figures out the chords for most of the songs fairly well, and with the ability to change tunings and apply capo it’s even nicer. It doesn’t always line up the chord changes perfectly but the chord diagrams can be moved to the correct location and if a chord doesn’t sound right you can change it. The ability to change the pitch also helps when a song is just a bit too high for me to sing, allowing me to get chords that are easier for me to sing without having to strain my voice. This app is well worth the money and there’s so much it can do that I haven’t even touched on or used.

A friend cued me in to this app and I have to say Im grateful that they did. The versatility of Capo is quite vast and frankly incredible. Even as a classically trained pianist I find this app perfect for learning pop tunes or transposing tunes to a key that better fits my vocal range. I showed Capo to my girlfriend who has struggled to play guitar and it was a miracle worker! She doesnt read music or tabs well and websites with chords werent quite cutting it for her. Being able to see the chords and the possible variations of the chords really worked for her, and she loved having the ability to loop sections. It has really helped her advance as a musician and since the piano roll and guitar chords are all right in front of our faces we can finally jam cohesively together, something I thought we were never going to achieve. What I like most about Capo is the ability to see all the possible variations of the chords, which is nice because sometimes the app doesnt get them completely right. To see the variations all you have to do is double click the chord and it shows you all the other possibilities of that chord! This is where Capo is powerful and more useful than sheet music or online chord websites. Having this feature really allows you to grow as a musician because you can relate relative chords to one another thus training your ear to distinguish these chords from one another. Pretty freaking awesome. Definitely worth the cash to invest in this app and to grow as a musician.

Great software, but making me pay for the same app when they update it is getting really old. Makes me want to search for competitors.

I like Capo, and have been using it for quite a while. I just want to agree with a previous review about the FORCED update from 2.1.12 to version 3. That is very uncool and very un Mac like. I use the word forced because I have many songs in my music database, and at church we perform them in a number of different keys depending on the singer. None of those old files will open and display the chords or spectagram now. That has never been a problem in the past. So, I paid my $30 for the new version, and my old files display properly again. Let USERS decide when to upgrade and pay additional money - that is our choice. If Adobe did the same thing I would drive out and burn down the headquarters.

Where has Capo been all my life? I do a lot of session work, in both production and performance, and all I can say is thank you for saving me so much time and effort. So often, I’ll get a two-track in my dropbox that needs guitar, bass or other instrumentation, and being able to instantly have the chord changes in front of me saves so much time and effort. The fun of being able to instantly and correctly play along with my music library is worth the cost of admission alone, but whoa…the audio engine within the app sounds mighty great when you slow down the tempo to learn the more complicated parts. It is wild playing along to prohibitively fast guitar lines at 1/2 speed. One thing to note - nothing is perfect 100% of the time, but Capo comes mighty close and works mighty fast. Fortunately, its really easy to edit any errors and add whatever chords and voicings that you’d like. Thanks for making such a killer app!

I used Ver. 2 for a long time until it broke itself when OS X updated. Now Ver. 3 imposes what it thinks are bars/measures instead of indicating real time but it gets the bars completely wrong. (If it can’t find the beat in a slow blues with a heavy back beat then how will it ever find anything??) And there is no real way to fix the measures, so you’re left with fake/incorrect bar numbers that run at the wrong tempo over the entire song. Worse, selections for looping or regions “snap” to those incorrect bars. Also, the new chord detection is wildly inaccurate. Then there’s the spectrograph which was useful in Ver. 2 but now the display is washed out and vague. Also, you can no longer just drop a marker to name the start of sections and instead you must have “regions” that run for some duration - I just want to mark the start of verses, solos, etc! Everything has taken a huge step backward with no indication that the developer gets it. I can’t even export the TABs that I would spend hours inputting? (Never could do that.) On the plus side, the interface is clean and inviting. But it has to be useable and it no longer is. I’ve gone with AnyTune which does not have the useless chord or spectrograph features but is worlds more robust for playback, slowdown, looping, marking, etc. Wish I had not bought Capo 3 first.

Love this app! It’s extremely user friendly! It’s really helpful that I can slow down the tempo of a song without changing the pitch…and also looping the regions for practice really comes in handy for covering songs, or even writing new original songs. Wish I had this app 5 years ago when I first tried learning guitar! Would have been so much easier! Really amazed by this technology and overall very happy with my purchase.

I really wish I didn’t have to RE-BUY this to use software I bought a long time ago but unfortunatly I need it so heres another 30 dollars I don’t have. Pretty bogus, Capo.

I had Capo 2 which was great - imagine my surprise to find that I get to buy Capo 3 for another $30 now that it no longer works with the lastest Mac OS. So I shell out the money only to find that 3 is not as good as 2. I can’t even find the markers to segment a section that I want to loop, slow down and learn. That’s all Capo is supposed to be for and that feature is gone. What the heck!!!! Do not buy this ntil they get their act together. Now - I get to shell out yet another $30 for Anytune. I only bought Capo because I had been happy with Capo2. Just amazing how easy it is to get ripped off here at the App store.

Dragged several mp3 to the application. Crash. Each and every time. For $30 you think you would get some error message or guidance, but no. Crash.

I use this app regularly to dissect what a musician is doing in a performance so that I can figure out nuances that the author plays that don’t translate into sheet music well. Not only does the ability to slow down a song come in handy, but the ability to move the pitch has helped as well. I have some difficulty with alternate tunings and Capo’s ability to show what’s happening on the fretboard. For my purposes., however, this app gets a huge thumbs up!

I am forced to update my intial review. With the help of support they were able to diagnose the issue quickly and most kindly. Shelley was MOST helpful and kind.

If you’re an aspiring musician, it’s worth the very reasonable price for the parts that work well. It cannot always deliver on getting chords right, particularly on more complex songs. The best thing about Capo is the ability to slow down the tempo while keeping it in the same key, or pitching the song up or down while keeping the same tempo. It does these things extremely well.

I use capo a lot, and now I cant use it since it’s taking up all of my system resources. Not sure why this is happening, but it needs to be fixed ASAP!

I’m a gigging musician and I also do a lot of session work. Capo chord maps the song quickly and it gets the tempo and key right everytime for me. Loving this tool! Lots of extra tricks for the professional such as midi export and key change.