Zplane deCoda £49 PC MAC

Ever wanted a quick way to decipher a track’s musical components? We may have the answer…

Whether you’re a seasoned producer or musical novice, understanding and isolating an existing track’s musical components can be very useful. Most DAWs already have features that can help, such as tempo analysis or timestretching. Veteran developers Zplane’s new app, deCoda (OS X 10.7 or later, Windows 7 or later), bundles together features ranging from tempo, key and chord analysis to pitch-shifting, time-stretch and filtering.

To get started, you simply load or drag-anddrop an audio file (wav, aiff, mp3, wma, flac or ogg) into the window and it analyses it. The workspace has an overview navigation bar at the top and transport play bar at the bottom. The central strip shows a looped section of the track and you can select one of two views: waveform or piano roll. The analysis detects tempo, key signature, chords and song sections, and this information is spread around the workspace including a scrolling timeline that shows the chords. The analysis also generates a frequency view, which forms part of the piano roll window.

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