Music tools

While the state of music tools on Linux isn't too bad, some things can be made better. This page is a collection of my efforts.

Pitch and tempo control in music players

There is an effort at scaletempo to include tempo scaling in all mayor music players. I've created a Rhythmbox plugin which adds a user-interface for tempo and pitch control.

Installation: download rhythmbox-scaletempo-0.1.1.tar.gz and extract it into ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins (you may have to create the directory first). Restart Rhythmbox, enable the plugin, and you'll see two new sliders: one for tempo, the other for pitch. Explore the menu Control to find keyboard shortcuts. Please note that is an early release and a lot may change in the future. It probably won't break anything, but take care.

Current plugin does not yet support the scaletempo GStreamer element (I haven't been able to get it working), but uses the soundtouch pitch element. This is available as part of GStreamer's bad plugins package, make sure you have that installed on your system. If it still fails, try deleting ~/.gstreamer/registry.*.xml to rebuild the GStreamer registry.