zplane.development releases deCoda Software
 

zplane.development releases deCoda Software

zplane.development Announces Ingenious deCoda Software To Help Musicians Wanting To Learn Songs Fast

Picking apart and learning a new song is a time-consuming and sometimes difficult process for any musician. Now zplane has combined numerous audio technologies within deCoda to make it easier and quicker to learn and practice new material. deCoda is software designed to help both new and established musicians with learning and practising passages of music.

Using simple drag and drop functionality, deCoda will automatically recognize and map the chords, song structure and tempo. The user can then play through sections at variable tempos starting off slowly and building up speed as proficiency increases. The musical key can also be instantly transposed, pitch changed in both directions by up to an octave and a focus EQ tool can isolate parts of the audio spectrum based on the frequency and panning information.

deCoda Features At A Glance

• Advanced chord and tempo detection algorithms
• Flexible looping options
• Automatic song structure detection - Part A, B C, A2, B2 etc.
• Available on Mac & Windows
• GUI designed with a touchscreen in mind
• Instantly transpose to a chosen key
• Change tempo whilst maintaining the pitch
• Focus EQ for isolating parts of the track
• Melody information displayed on a piano roll
• Exportable MIDI
• One off low price for a perpetual license

Specification

OS: Mac OS min 10.7, Windows min. 7 x86/x64 Audio: CoreAudio, Windows Audio, DirectX, ASIO Video: min 1366x768 resolution
CPU: Min 1.5Ghz

Supported AudioFormats: wav, aiff, mp3, wma, flac, ogg

Pricing

SRP €49.00 intro special offer €29 until end of January 2020.

More Information

Visit www.decoda.app for more information, videos and to download a demo.

So can this detect complex jazz chords? Can it also transpose?

I am self taught and am having trouble remembering older songs I wrote on keyboard since I" don't write music. The detection software I'm using seems to guess more ballpark than precise.....

oooh, looks interesting, i'd better download a demo this afternoon

I think it would be cool if the export loop process would do acidised or warp markers etc..

also can this be run in batches against a load of files?

also, is the meta data generated in the 'project' accessible in some way? xml files or something? edit -ok they're 'zvt' files, and the software says it uses sqlite..

i'd like to run this against my many scraps of audio and then (probably using a database) analyze similarities, repeats etc..

Zplane - you could develop this into a huge helper for the millions of us disorganised songwriters.... not just for folk who want to learn a song..

This thing is great! And a steal for the best pitch/time algorithms in the game.

The transposition is extremely good (as one would expect from zplane) but not only can it not "detect complex jazz chords", it's not very good at the basics.

deCoda allows one to name chords manually as follows:
maj, min, dim, aug, sus2, sus4, maj7, min7, 7, dim7, hdim7, maj6, min6, 9, maj9, min9

Even in the simplest tests it can't usually detect them itself.

I created a 16 bar wave file with each bar being four crotchets of a chord in root position. I used a piano sound and the results were as follows when the velocities were fixed at 72:

Chord deCapo's interpretation
----- -----------------------
C maj C
C min Eb
C dim A dim
C aug Ab aug
C sus2 Bb
C sus4 Bb
C maj7 C
C min7 Eb
C 7 C
C dim7 A dim
C hdim7 A dim
C maj6 A min
C min6 A dim
C 9 C
C maj9 C
C min9 Eb

With velocities that varied slightly, the results quickly became more inaccurate and with real-world material, it can be very wide of the mark.

deCoda has some promise but the harmonic analysis isn't satisfactory at the moment.

Have you tried it? The piano roll is promising but the harmonic analysis is so weak that it wouldn't help anyone. There's no way of indicating inversions (A/C# for example). Drawing notes on the piano roll is very buggy.

Hopefully it will improve but at the moment, it's of very limited use when it comes to transcription (my main interest). One can put a lot of work in and still not have anything of much value. I'll be carrying on using Reaper with plug-ins (and my ears) for analysis and Dorico for the output.

If it's really only going to be a tool for facilitating playing along with tracks, then it might mature relatively quickly.

To be honest I was mostly playing with the pitch and time manipulation cooge I'm sure the analysis is not as strong, any other software I've tried like Capo 3 has been pretty flawed. It seems reasonably accurate though, like I just tried opening "And I Love Her" to throw it a softball and it looks correct to me.

Gave it a quick go. Well, let's be honest, with only a 2 minute demo available, a quick go is all anyone's going to get! Anyhoo, threw some Anthrax at it, it did a very good job of detecting the different sections, verses, choruses and so on, and the chord detection was spot on too. Sure, Anthrax don't use any "complex jazz chords" but if I wanted to learn a song quickly, this seems really good.

Having said that, I just tried some Queens of the Stone Age and that wasn't so great with the chords - the choruses threw different results each time. It did detect the different sections very well though but I can do that by ear :heh:

But the 2 minute demo is a real ball-ache. Yes, I can reload and carry on but it's kills the excitement somewhat.

Can the "Parts" at the top be edited? Seems like a no-brainer feature but I haven't found a way to change when they begin and end or add and remove parts. Also, the UI/navigation is very clunky on this. For instance, if I just want to zoom in on a custom range, there doesn't seem to be a good way to do this. Why can't I just zoom in and out of the waveform or a draw a zoom marquee? For instance, it had a hard time recognizing the tempo of a particular song, and it was hard to "draw my own measure" in order to get the tempo re-calibrated because of the zoom restrictions. It would've been easier to just let me first create a custom zoom selection, or place markers at the beat locations.

Otherwise, it works pretty well while being far from perfect. Some things translate very well, others a bit less so, but it'll help get in the ballpark very quickly.