BestPractice
An open-source audio time-stretching tool for Windows
SCSI is a block-based set of commands that connects computing devices to networked storage, including spinning up storage media and data reads/writes. The protocol uses initiators to send SCSI commands to storage device targets on remote servers.
- The calling application creates the SCSI command descriptor block, which can include a request for request-sense data if a CHECK CONDITION occurs. IOCTLSCSIPASSTHROUGH is a buffered device control request. To bypass buffering in system memory, callers should use IOCTLSCSIPASSTHROUGHDIRECT.
- SCSI (pronounced SKUH-zee and sometimes colloquially known as 'scuzzy'), the Small Computer System Interface, is a set of American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard electronic interfaces that allow personal computers (PCs) to communicate with peripheral hardware such as disk drives, tape drives, CD-ROM drives, printers and scanners faster and more flexibly than previous parallel data transfer interfaces.
- Page 133 ONE Technologies SCSI-Bus A data cable used to transfer data between your computer and your SCSI devices. The SCSI bus is a high-speed data cable that can be compared to other bus systems. SCSI Controller Controls the transfer of data through the SCSI bus. The SCSI controller is normally located on the mother board of your Mac.
- Ahead Software ported their popular CD/DVD burning software to Linux. NeroLINUX is a comprehensive, yet flexible application provided you have some prior knowledge of CD/DVD technologies. Here's some additional information assist you:. NeroLINUX uses NeroAPI for low-level operations (burn process).
v1.03 - December 28th 2007
What?
BestPractice is a musician's practice tool, to slow down or speed up music, either from an MP3 file or directly from a CD. Ordinarily the sound is distorted when slowed down our sped up - you get the effect like when playing a 33 rpm record on 45 rpm speed (remember the Chipmunks?). BestPractice tries to correct this, so you can slow down and speed up music, while keeping the original pitch. It is also possible to change the pitch of the music without affecting its tempo. Play along with for instance Eb tuned guitars without retuning your own, or slow down that high-speedguitar solo on a CD that you like to learn.
Why?
This splits up in two parts: 'why is BestPractice made?' and 'why would I use it?'
To start with the first: I saw that there were programs available on the internet that do this, and you have to pay for them ($20 to $50). Since I thought: 'I can do that', I had to prove it, right?
And for part two - well, there are probably more reasons, but those I can think of are:
- You'd like to transcribe music, but need to slow it down to hear it right
- You can tune the song to your instrument instead of the other way around
- You'd like to sing along, but you need to change the key to match your voice
- You're learning a foreign language and you'd like to slow down the spoken examples
- You're like me and like to fool around with audio and/or digital signal processing
- You think that playing Celine Dion at rave speed is fun =D
Download
You can find the installer for BestPractice here (652 kb). Please consider a donation if you find BestPractice useful; already just a few dollars is very much appreciated! See Donations.The source code can be found here.
Note that the cd ripping library used by BestPractice, akrip32, is licensed under the LGPL and the full source code is available from akrip.sourceforge.net. You do not need to download this to use BestPractice.
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Translations
BestPractice can be translated quite easily to (almost) any language.The amount of work for the program itself is limited to translating ~72 lines, where a line is a few words at max. The translations are created from a text file, with '.po' as extension. I use a program called poEdit (freeware, www.poedit.net), which makes editing a bit easier, though any text editor capable of saving unformatted plain text files will do (like notepad). A template to modify to your own language you can find here (zipped, the dutch version) If you need any help or explanation, feel free to ask me. Or, if you see errors for your language, please contactme to correct this.
Languages already provided by users:
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- English
- Dutch
- German (M.A. Haas)
- French (J-C Brotel, B. Zonderman)
- Japanese (Swin Sakata)
- Spanish (David Fernandez, Jaime Flores)
- Swedish (Ola Mårtensson)
- Danish (Hans-Jørgen Hansen)
- Brazilian Portuguese (Claudio Brandt)
- Italian (J)
- Chinese (Cherri Hsu)
- Hungarian (Németh Balázs)
- Russian (Стас Бушуев - Stas Bushuev)
To do
There are still a lot of things to do, have a look here for details:
Source Forge tasklist
Bugs
No CD players found
On Windows XP/2000, the cd ripping library uses the SCSI passthrough interface. For some set-ups, mostly involving burners or virtual drives, no CD players or not all CD players are found. If this is the case, get the file wnaspi32.dll provided by Ahead Software AG from here. Download this file and place it in the program folder of BestPractice. Often the problem is then solved.
In case you're wondering, due to the license I cannot include a copy of this dll with the program (as far as I know).
BestPractice crashes
on Windows 98:
If only I knew what is going on... But I don't, so no solution available yet. Please do keep the crash reports coming, one day I'll figure it out. Two suggestions:- Try the wnaspi32.dll described just above
- Try the akrip32.dll from here. Place this DLL also in the program folder of BestPractice.
On XP or Vista
Sometimes this is caused by the absence of any CD player. Though BestPractice shouldn't care, apparently the cd reading library doesn't behave well on some computer/windows combinations. As a workaround, you can install a virtual cd drive, such as Daemon Tools.Running BestPractice as restricted user
This needs some preparations (thanks to Matthias L., and I quote):
'it looks as if the problem is solved. Nero didn´t find any CD writer on the machine. This happens if the current user has restricted rights. Ahead software provides a tool called 'Nero BurnRights' to fix this. After using this tool, BestPractice works fine (as does Nero, of course :). One little trick remains: on exit, your software tries to write to bpsettings.ini. So one has to adjust the rights of this file, or - at first - generate it via a run of BestPractice as an admin (then the file can be created).'
Please report other problems on the forum.
Donations
Should you happen to like BestPractice, then a nice e-mail is always very much appreciated. Should you happen to like BestPractice even more, a small donation as a way to say thank you is most welcome. You can either donate through PayPal (no account needed when using a credit card): Or, you can ask me for my snail mail address and stick to the old-fashioned envelope+cash system.
Contact
You can contact me (Robert Moerland) at bestpractice@xs4all.nl.
History
Version 1.03
- Bug Fix: improved mp3 file recognition (again)
- Added Russian translation (thanks to Стас Бушуев - Stas Bushuev)
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Version 1.02
- Bug Fix: improved mp3 file recognition
- Added Hungarian translation (thanks to Németh Balázs)
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Version 1.01
- Bug Fix: handling of ID3V2 tags is improved
- Added Chinese translation (thanks to Cherri Hsu)
Version 1.00
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- Bug fix: pausing, dragging the cue bar and unpausing actually resumes playing
- Bug fix: shortening the loop interval to 1/100th of a second does not hang the application anymore
- Bug fix: repeating a song a couple of times does not corrupt the audio anymore