Slowplay - A new tool inspired by playitslowly

[aFunkyBass]

Hello everyone,

after years of using playitslowly for my bass classes I was forced to quit it after updating my laptop OS to a new Mint version, so I decided to write something similar that could work on modern Linux box and here is what I came up with: Slowplay

As you may notice it is HEAVILY inspired by playitslowly. I also copied small chunk of Jonas code into my software... ;) Comparing to playitslowly I stripped off the starting and ending point, and I completely reworked the keyboard shortcuts to fit my personal needs while teaching music.

Anyway, feel free to download it and try it. Keep in mind that it has just been released and it's still at early staging, but it might do the job.

Thank you @jwagner for your great work and inspiration.
Guido

[jwagner]

Hey Guido,

Thank you for sharing your player. Would you be ok if I linked to it from the README?
Is there a website to link to or should I point users to the github repo?

[aFunkyBass]

Ciao Jonas, it would be very nice of you to link to my project, even though I don't know if it is suitable for a non experienced Linux user as it still brand new. There's no installation procedure, no desktop integration, and I had not the possibility to test it on many systems. Anyway if someone is brave enough to try, it will be great.

You can link the github repo, I have not a site for now.

I'd like to thank you once again for creating playitslowly, you probably don't know but many Italian bassists can play bass thank to your app. :)

All the best
Guido Pietrella.

[nazarux]

These are great news! Congratulations.

I’ve been using playitslowly for more than a decade and it’s still a main tool in my guitar classes.
Slowplay looks great! I hope you plan to include the loop function, witch is very useful for learning purposes (like learning/practicing a guitar solo).

I’m still using Playitslowly with the latest ubuntu. Two years ago I’ve started to read about “how to create an AppImage” so I can still use playitslowly. Through the process I’ve found a Flathub version that works (but Flathub must be installed and, like snap, it uses a lot of storage resources).
So, I’ve just fixed the [gi.require_version('Gtk', '3.0')] issue, booted from a Ubuntu 18.04 live cd, installed a few python modules and compiled it with Pyinstaller without the –onefile option. After changing/deleting some configuration stuff in the folder to make it match the system gtk themes installed, it’s working ok.

[aFunkyBass]

Hey @nazarux thank you!

I stripped off the loop function because I never really used it. The problem with loop (in my opinion as a bassist) is that it makes no sense if not associated with some kind of onset detection: which is, you can never get the starting/ending loop points to fall precisely on the beat... Playing along with "choppy jumps", simply drives me nuts... :)

Obviously I'd like to introduce back the loop, but only once I have a better way to handle it. Lately, I started playing around with librosa with the purpose of detecting onsets and snap to them. Another feature I'd like to implement if I ever include librosa, is speed variation based on BPM rather than percentage: say the song is 120 BPM, play it at 100 BPM. I still have to experiment with librosa, as my skills are too weak at this time, but I plan to improve it sooner or later.

Anyway, even if there's no loop, I invite you to try it using the num keypad shortcuts which I really find nice once you get used to it: the numbers on the left (1-4-6) move the playing point backwards by 5, 10 and 15 seconds, while numbers on the right (3-6-9) move it forward. Believe me, its' really easy and straightforward to reach the desired point of playing with these... ;)

Happy guitar teaching!
Guido.

[aFunkyBass]

Slowplay looks great! I hope you plan to include the loop function, witch is very useful for learning purposes (like learning/practicing a guitar solo).

Hello @nazarux, after long time I'm here again to tell you that I've finally managed to add the loop function to SlowPlay in the latest version. It also includes an interface to extract audio from YouTube videos and treat them as regular audio files, which I think is cool.

Please give it a try and let me know your thougths

[nazarux]

Please give it a try and let me know your thougths

Looks great! Congratulations. Taking audio from youtube directly to Playitslowly it's what I do everyday with a script that downloads usind yt-dlp, either m4a or converting to mp3 with ffmpeg and opening it in Playitslowly! Unfortunatly I got an error with Slowplay: Unable to download audio file from youtube. I'll open an issue in https://github.com/aFunkyBass/slowplay. Thanks for your work.