Time Shift
Time Shift is an application for Mac OS X which will play sound files while time-stretching or pitch-shifting. It's intended for people who want to learn or transcribe tunes from CDs and need to hear them slowed down.
A screen shot of Time Shift
Time Shift is a very basic, does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin application. It is the result of perhaps two hours work with the Core Audio SDK, followed by days of sweating blood over Altivec code to make it go fast enough. There are several other applications out there which do the same thing and have more features, but this one's free!
No warranty is implied or expressed. Use at your own risk. Not suitable for use in air traffic control systems or nuclear power plants. Do not use for navigation. Contents may be hot.
Requirements
You need Mac OS 10.2 or later and a G4 or G5 processor to run Time Shift. It won't run on a G3 or older as it requires Altivec to do the pitch-shifting in real time. There is no Windows or Mac OS 9 version, nor is there likely to be. Sorry.
Download
Running It
Just double-click on it, drag sound files into the list, press the play button and fiddle with the sliders. Note that you can drag sound files directly from a CD - there's no need to copy them onto your disk.
Bugs and Limitations
- It's very slow to start playing MP3 files.
- There are no other transport buttons apart from Play and Stop. I might add some more later.
- You can't save the output as a file.
- You can't remove files from the list.
- If your processor is too slow, you just get silence.