A brief review from a slack key novice: An excellent book as collection of nicely transcribed slack key songs but not necessarily instructional for slack key technique. I liked the inclusion of notation and tabs for players who read music; its like having a compass. The CD includes the exercises and each tune; once played through slowly and a portion at performance tempo. My minor peeve is that the exercises on the CD are very short in real time and grouped several to a track. They'd be more convenient for practice if they were looped once or twice so they'd play longer, and each given a separate track, so a user could replay each easily with the "<<" button instead of scrolling through the the track and trying to find the beginning point.
Fran's right. Audacity is an excellent tool and the price is right! So is Sony's Sound Forge audio studio (not free but not expensive). I use it to set markers at every bar line and then I can find a given passage and loop it.
Just browsing some old posts and categories. And will probably check on whether Audacity, and/or Sound Forge are still an option. Or perhaps updated or obsolete...This is a 7 year-old post! Like being on Mars! Go ahead Taropatch, I'm listening! Warning, because of time delay, answers may take 7 years.
I use REAPER https://www.reaper.fm/ for my practice tool. It's very reasonably priced ($60), comes in a demo form that is fully functional, and supports video. A bit more complicated than Audacity but vastly more powerful.