BPMinus
Today, I am very happy to release BPMinus to the public. BPMinus was a tool I thought of creating a number of years back, being very dissatisfied with the the current time-stretching tools on the market. A while passed, and I was still sorely disappointed with the tool offerings out there. I decided to get to work. Very quickly I realized that this was a bigger project than meets the eye. There was a lot to understand about audio processing and even more to understand about how to create a nice user experience in such an application. BPMinus is still not a final product. I’m releasing it to the world as a beta so that I may obtain feedback, fix bugs, and implement new features with the helpful guidance of the community.
So, what does BPMinus do? BPMinus will slow your music down without changing the pitch. This is a fantastic way to practice, transcribe, and understand fast-paced and hard-to-learn songs. That’s not all it does, but it’s what I (and most people) will use it for. It also does pitch correction, analyzes BPM, and more.
The journey has been an interesting one. I started out creating the different controls I thought I would need in my application. That spawned into a fun open source project called the “WPF Sound Visualization Library.” I’m happy that a number of people out there are getting some great use out of my controls.
At some point after I had plastered my sparkly new controls on a Window, I had to start thinking about how BPMinus would become an actual usable program. This is where I must give a heartfelt and sincere thanks to my drum instructor, Dave, who was instrumental in helping me figure out what sort of features would be useful in a music classroom setting. I still have a number of his ideas in a big list to implement, but he has helped me turn BPMinus into something I hope music teachers and students will come to really appreciate.
