Whether you are playing along with or transcribing music, having an app or music player that has an “A-B” function is a game changer. With Anytune, you can not only easily loop any section of a song, but you can also adjust the playback speed.  The one caveat is that you will need to have a physical MP3/MP4/Wav file to import into Anytune.  Check out “Get the Music You Need” below for a suggestion on how to acquire hard to find music files.

There are many great metronome apps on the market, so if you are happy with yours, by all means keep using it.  My goto favorite is Pro Metronome.  I have found it to be the most intuitive and fully featured app for the money (there is also a free version).  The features I use the most on Pro Metronome and therefore recommend it to my students are the Polyrhythm programmer, the Tap button, the Rhythmic trainer, and the playlist creater.

Their website is currently down but you can read the publisher description here:

To be clear, I always try to purchase the music I need before resorting to the following suggestion  (this is our “hypocratic” obligation as musicians).  Occasionally however, there are songs that I can’t find, or I am unable to use the version I already own in the way I would like to (particularly on Anytune).  For these songs, I use DVDFab’s YouTube to MP3 (free version).  There are other free online converters, but many can lead to computer viruses/malware  (I learned the hard way).  I have used DVDFab for 15 years with no issues.

If you want to A-B loop sections of your digital music without purchasing an app such as Anytune, there is a great free online utility called MP3 Cut.  It has a ridiculous amount of free features for editing audio files, and is super intuitive.