The team at SuperMegaUltraGroovy recently released Capo 3.5, which improves the overall user experience and adds support for the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

Song Views provides a way to select between the all-new Practice view and Tabbing view to reveal the Spectrogram display where users can quickly “draw” notes to generate tablature. The option to disable the display of Capo’s automatically-detected chords, as well as the tablature display, is now available as well.

Also included in the 3.5 update is the new Transcription Playhead. This playback mode was designed to make it easier to repeatedly listen to short licks or individual notes. The Transcription Playhead always re-starts playback from the same point until it is moved to a different location.

Capo 3.5 now takes advantage of the Touch Bar that was introduced with the new MacBook Pro.  A new waveform overview scrubber is included that displays the waveform of the song as well as the location of any regions that the user has set. The overview can be tapped to jump to a specific point in the song, or scrubbed (with audible feedback) by gliding their finger along the Touch Bar

The update also includes a reworked scrubbing feature. Activated by clicking and dragging the playhead on Capo’s timeline, the user can “freeze time” in a song. This allows for the ability to more easily identify individual notes in complicated phrases.

“I spent a week in the summer prototyping a new effect that would allow users to ’freeze time’ so that they could hold a note still to help identify it by ear,” says Chris Liscio, SuperMegaUltraGroovy’s founder and chief developer. “I attached it to Capo’s scrubbing feature—just to see whether it worked—and I couldn’t stop playing with it. Since then, I’ve used it to pick apart some truly difficult solos in the Tabbing view faster than ever before.”

Capo has still retained its core features of allowing users to slow down music without altering pitch, transposing music to other keys, and automatically detecting chords in music. The app offers simple-to-use tabbing functionality on the Mac with support for bass, guitar, ukulele, banjo, and mandolin in various tunings.

Availability and Pricing

Capo 3.5 is available today from the Mac App Store for $49.99. A free trial is available at capoapp.com/mac and is fully functional until five minutes of audio pass through the system, when noise is slowly inserted into the output.