Beat Detection

[kenland]

Hi all.

Finally coming back to the board (and DP in general) after a fairly long hiatus living with Logic & Pro Tools. Some recent indie film projects have led me to realize that the feature set in DP contains a lot of what I'd wished I had while working on these projects, so I'm trying to crash course my way back to fluency in DP.

Now I'm not a newbie to DP (worked on Performer off and on since about version 4 (I believe)) so on a general level I'm very comfortable. I've been pulling some old tracks to play with newer features that I haven't really worked with (Beat Detection in particular). I should also note that I'm on version 6.03 (7 will have to come with the next project.)

Doing beat detection is really messing with me. I feel I'm missing one little step in making it work but can't seem to suss out my issue. I've been mining the forum for tips on usage and found a number of posts regarding Beat Detection but still seem to come up short.

So here's what I've been trying to do. I have some multitrack sessions I've previously recorded, with a good drummer and a relatively steady band as well. I wanted to work with aligning the beat grid to these tracks to add some MIDI work. I also wanted to play with quantizing audio as well. All of the tracks were BWF files with valid timestamps.

So I picked a track (the kick initially - later tried with the snare track as well) and opened it in the sound file editor. I adjusted beats to match the transients. I went back to the sequence editor and analyzed the soundbite tempo. I then applied the soundbite tempo to the sequence.

A shift then occurred. If I solo up the kick track (or whatever track I was analyzing) and listen to the click with it, it indeed works! However, all of the other tracks have shifted in some way I can't really explain, just not synchronized with the analyzed track.


What am I missing?

Sorry for the longwinded post! It's good to be back

Thanks

Ken

[benmrx]

Did you 'copy beats' from the kick and paste them into the other drum tracks?

[kenland]

Aha! I knew i was missing something simple. I will try this at my earliest opportunity. Thanks!

[kenland]

Once again, I know I'm missing something simple. I think it might be a selection issue.

In the Sequence Editor, I went to copy beats from my analyzed track (in this case, my Kick). A dialogue comes up asking where I want to copy from (even though only my Kick is selected). The copy button is grayed out and doesn't allow for copying.

So... I tried selecting all my tracks and followed the same procedure. The copy button still seems to work. However, then the tracks once again get out of sync.

By the way, I'm certain that if I were to check the manual I'd find this without bothering any of you. However, thanks to the Nashville area flooding a couple of months ago, I haven't found the box where the manual ended up.

Thanks for the help!

Ken

[kassonica]

Once again, I know I'm missing something simple. I think it might be a selection issue.

In the Sequence Editor, I went to copy beats from my analyzed track (in this case, my Kick). A dialogue comes up asking where I want to copy from (even though only my Kick is selected). The copy button is grayed out and doesn't allow for copying.

So... I tried selecting all my tracks and followed the same procedure. The copy button still seems to work. However, then the tracks once again get out of sync.

By the way, I'm certain that if I were to check the manual I'd find this without bothering any of you. However, thanks to the Nashville area flooding a couple of months ago, I haven't found the box where the manual ended up.

Thanks for the help!

Ken

You could call Motu and get them to send another manual, $20 or so I believe.

[benmrx]

Are you using the 'quantize beats within soundbites' option, or are you using the 'create beats from soundbites' and then 'quantize soundbites' method?

[kenland]

I have found part of my issue.

For some reason, sync points were all over the place on my tracks, and when I tried to adjust sequence to soundbite tempo, it was aligning these misplaced sync points. Still figuring it out, I'll update when I make headway.

Thanks to everyone for the helpful comments.

Ken