Zplane deCoda £49

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.

Practice

Armed with this you can then do various tasks such as loop specific sections, change the tempo without changing pitch and change the pitch without changing tempo. All rather handy if you’re trying to work out or learn to play parts in a track. On a similar tip, deCoda also includes an onboard synth, providing not only a metronome but also chord and note playback. The chords follow those displayed in the timeline, meanwhile notes can be drawn within the piano roll view to pick out melodic elements. You can balance everything using the fold-out mixer, and play along via a plugin of your choice using the input (deCoda includes a lite version of Amplitube 4). There’s even a rather handy focus filter (see explainer below) to help pinpoint specific sounds in the track. To round things off, there are various export options, including MIDI files and lead sheets in plain text and ChordPro formats.

Obviously, the analysis is vital to deCoda’s success. We found it picked the key signature very successfully and got the main chord triads (major, minor, augmented and diminished) correct. Nevertheless, we found it struggled to spot 7ths and extended chords. On the upside, deCoda does actually analyse and follow the tempo changes in a track, and where there’s a clear beat it picks these up very well.

To rectify analysis problems, you can tweak a number of things, including key and time signatures, sections, and chords, and further markers can be added using the Bookmark page. If deCoda doesn’t pick the downbeat correctly you can also slide the whole track or select a full bar to redefine the beat grid. Alas, you can’t access the internal tempo map, and where it struggles to spot downbeats (less beatdriven music, for example) this would be helpful.

deCoda clearly provides quite an eclectic toolset that can be used in a multitude of ways. Some aspects need a little refinement but overall we particularly like the speed and quality of the pitch and timing options, and also the focus filter. At £49 it’s also a bargain.

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