VLC: The best media player for musicians learning songs from recordings

VLC is an amazing media player for musicians. It's called 'media' player as it plays video besides audio formats, but I'll will focus on its features that makes it great for us, musicians.

1. The first is, it's available for Linux, Apple Mac and Windows. These are the three main Operating Systems musicians use.

2. The second thing is, it plays everything! Or almost everything at least, as it seems that new kind of media files appear every week:-)
   For musicians is interesting that it plays most audio formats: MP3, OGG, Real (audio), WAV, Raw Audio, FLAC, M4A and MIDI files.
   You don't need to switch to different players for various formats, thus.

1. Fast forward/Rewind: It has customizable hot keys for up to 4 different time jumps: very short, short, medium and long forward/backward jump. They range from a few seconds to a few minutes. Ideal for learning or playing along a song.  Default shortcuts use two keys, but can be customized to one only.

2. But to me its most exciting feature is the change of speed (with customizable hot keys). Two rates here, faster/slower and faster/slower (fine). This is the main tool I use to learn those fast guitar/bouzouki solos. As I advance, I set the speed faster and eventually hit the 'reset speed' shortcut (default is "=").

When I started learning the guitar, I used cassette-tape player where a friend of mine incorporated a huge rotating button that would change the speed (and also the pitch, of course). Then I would de-tune the guitar, learn the solo, set the speed to normal, tune the guitar again...

But with VLC the pitch is naturally unchanged while one changing the speed of a song.

I wish they could incorporate a separate, independent pitch-wheel as well: that way, it would be easier to play along some older recordings that vary in their concert pitch. But, hey, one never knows:-)

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