Beat Detective vs Motu's new Beat Engine

[dick-swifter]

Hi, Has anyone here tried both. I'm using DP 4.6 and Logic 7. Drum tightening takes Sooooo long in DP and Logic that i'm considering the purchase of a Pro-Tools Mbox just so I can use Beat Detective and according to what I'm told, save myself hours per song on editing.

If DP5's Beat Engine is just as good, it's a no brainer to upgrade to DP5, but Motu use to advertise how great their pitch and time compression features were and, well... you know....... I'm skeptical.

Thanks!

Mitch

[Mr_Clifford]

Hi, Has anyone here tried both. I'm using DP 4.6 and Logic 7. Drum tightening takes Sooooo long in DP and Logic that i'm considering the purchase of a Pro-Tools Mbox just so I can use Beat Detective and according to what I'm told, save myself hours per song on editing.

If DP5's Beat Engine is just as good, it's a no brainer to upgrade to DP5, but Motu use to advertise how great their pitch and time compression features were and, well... you know....... I'm skeptical.

Well, firstly, DP's pitch and time compression may not be as good as Serato Pitch 'n Time or Melodyne, but it kicks the bum out of the pitch/time functions that you get bundled with Pro Tools, which are next to useless.

On to the beat detection side. Once you get the hang of it (which is pretty easy) DP's beat detection works great. Once you turn on the beat-grid you can make edits on the beats within your music and do really quick cuts, pastes etc. then quantize to the DP grid if you want to get that 'live-drummer-sounds-like-a-sequencer' sound. I haven't gone real deep into it, but I think it will work at least as well as Pro Tools.

On the other hand, the audio editing in Pro Tools is very good. But, of course, you'd lose all the vastly superior MIDI editing and composing functions of DP, and you'll be limited to Pro Tools LE's 32 track limit.

Also, be aware that Pro Tools hardware does not work very well with other DAW's (like DP), on account of the Core-Audio driver being so bad.

[dick-swifter]

Thanks for the input, any other opinions? If I were to go the Pro Tools route it would only be to edit the drums in Beat Detective, and then send the edited drums back to DP or Logic the rest of the way.

I'm trying to look at it like this, if I can spend about $400 for a piece of software (with free interface-Mbox) that can do the job in 10 minutes versus the 4 to 6 hours it now takes me to basically manually cut every beat on the grouped drum tracks, move them to the correct place, fill in the gap, do a crossfade.... and repeat and repeat and repeat.
BTW, if that is a stupid way of doing drum tightening, I'd love to hear a better way. Of course a better drummer, but sadly a lot of really good drummers get quantized these days, and in certain styles this has become a neccesary evil.

But of course if DP does it just as well for the price of the upgrade, than that's prol'y the way to go.

Again- Thank you.

Mitch

[Splinter]

I personally think DP's Beat Detection Engine is a joke. It's a nightmare to use, if it works at all, and frequently crashes the app. It might be good for slicing and aligning 4 bar loops, but for slicing and aligning entire songs, it is entirely unintelligent and more work than necessary. It's easier to cut every beat and move it by hand.

[toodamnhip]

I personally think DP's Beat Detection Engine is a joke. It's a nightmare to use, if it works at all, and frequently crashes the app. It might be good for slicing and aligning 4 bar loops, but for slicing and aligning entire songs, it is entirely unintelligent and more work than necessary. It's easier to cut every beat and move it by hand.

I am on the fence about DP's beat detection..

I think it detects beats very well, but what the hell you do with it after is not very intuitive...

I think DP should take a page from logic in how logic makes it very easy to use whole groups of effects, having bundled them for you...

DP could easily integrate a numbered, ste by step protocol so that a user want to quantize a live drummer for instance, need only go to the "quantize live drummer" temlplet, at which point DO would take the user through every step...just follow the numbers..it would be much easier...

After all this time, I am just starting to figure out DP beat detection..really?

I think it is better than pro tools by far, it seems possible that it does s much it is actually confusing because ot does so much..thus the need for a piant by numbers, connect the dots templet for varisou application...
What say you?

Dave

[rcannonp]

Are you editing multiple tracks at once? I think that if you want to do this with Beat Detective that you have to have the Music Production Toolkit from Digi which costs another $500.

[Splinter]

Are you editing multiple tracks at once? I think that if you want to do this with Beat Detective that you have to have the Music Production Toolkit from Digi which costs another $500.

I believe this is correct. PT LE doesn't have beat detective with it. Typical for Digi. If you want this feature or that, git outch yer wad. But from what I understand Beat Detective is much more intuitive than DP's BDE.

I agree with Dave. That DP detects beats well, the problem is what you do with them afterward. That said, there are some serious bugs in the features. I have never been able to copy the beats from one track to another thus making drum editing impossible. The groove matching is flat out broken... stuff doesn't line up. If you slice too many beats at once... CRASH!

As far as I'm concerned BDE is still in beta form and I don't expect MOTU to ever improve it. They've checked it off their list of features to add... now on to the next feature. DP is filled with broken tools just like that. You just try to steer clear of them to keep from crashing the app.

Now, if I had my way, BDE would have a way to detect a specified rhythmic value. Just changing the sensitivity and the other parameter (I can't remember the name) doesn't cut it. It needs a "detect eighth notes" or some specified value that will look for only those divisions. The present algorithm looks at amplitude mostly with no musical concern, so it is very difficult to get it to find the beats you need it to find to manipulate it properly. You usually end up with way too many or not enough. Either that or when you go to slice the beats BDE ought to let you specify the beats to slice... like only eighths or sixteenths, etc...

Of course, the other features just ought to work... no tricks involved.

[boonier]

I agree with Dave. That DP detects beats well, the problem is what you do with them afterward. That said, there are some serious bugs in the features. I have never been able to copy the beats from one track to another thus making drum editing impossible. The groove matching is flat out broken... stuff doesn't line up. If you slice too many beats at once... CRASH!

i found that if you merge the soundbite before you copy beats then it is successful. Dont ask me why. It is also intermittent which is annoying.

I seems to have problems with the resulting soundbite after quantizing beats within soundbites (have a look at the source in soundbite info)...i have to merge the soundbite (effectively duplicating it) and then re-analyse beats and then copy them.

[Mr_Clifford]

I believe this is correct. PT LE doesn't have beat detective with it. Typical for Digi. If you want this feature or that, git outch yer wad. But from what I understand Beat Detective is much more intuitive than DP's BDE.

I have beat detective with my version of Pro Tools LE. I haven't used it much. The one time I tried to use it, it seemed to not do what I wanted so I abandoned it and did things manually. I guess you probably have to get right into it to get it to do what you want. It didn't strike me as a magic quick-fix though.

In general, I've found that Pro Tools is a bit better at the type of multi-track editing that you need to do with live drums (or an orchestra). It just seems to know how to handle the groupings better. I do like DP's Beat Detection, but so far I've only used it on single tracks, a bit like PT's Tab to transient function.

I suspect that if you're drummer is so bad that you have to slice up the entire track and quantize it, then you'd be better off getting BFD and programming it yourself. Or else get the drummer to record individual hits and put it in a sampler - I've done that before with great results.

[Resonant Alien]

Boonier and Splinter -

Just noticing that you guys were both still on DP 4.61 (so am I). I was wondering if maybe some of the problems you are experiencing with BDE were fixed in DP5??

[sdfalk]

I've been using DP 5.01 and DPs Beta engine on some unusual soundscape/
percussive audio and found it fairly starightforward to use.
Mind you when it was first introduced, I took the better part of a few
days to get aquainted with it.
It's hardly perfect, but I find it pretty effective most of the time.
It doesnt crash on me either.

[toodamnhip]

Are you editing multiple tracks at once? I think that if you want to do this with Beat Detective that you have to have the Music Production Toolkit from Digi which costs another $500.

I believe this is correct. PT LE doesn't have beat detective with it. Typical for Digi. If you want this feature or that, git outch yer wad. But from what I understand Beat Detective is much more intuitive than DP's BDE.

I agree with Dave. That DP detects beats well, the problem is what you do with them afterward. That said, there are some serious bugs in the features. I have never been able to copy the beats from one track to another thus making drum editing impossible. The groove matching is flat out broken... stuff doesn't line up. If you slice too many beats at once... CRASH!

As far as I'm concerned BDE is still in beta form and I don't expect MOTU to ever improve it. They've checked it off their list of features to add... now on to the next feature. DP is filled with broken tools just like that. You just try to steer clear of them to keep from crashing the app.

Now, if I had my way, BDE would have a way to detect a specified rhythmic value. Just changing the sensitivity and the other parameter (I can't remember the name) doesn't cut it. It needs a "detect eighth notes" or some specified value that will look for only those divisions. The present algorithm looks at amplitude mostly with no musical concern, so it is very difficult to get it to find the beats you need it to find to manipulate it properly. You usually end up with way too many or not enough. Either that or when you go to slice the beats BDE ought to let you specify the beats to slice... like only eighths or sixteenths, etc...

Of course, the other features just ought to work... no tricks involved.

I love that idea of limiting DP beat detection to 16th notes for example...Nice one!

May it could go like this: 1st Beat detection is unlimited to get your sequence at leas somewhat CLOSE to the tempo of the audio...

Then, it can have a secondary "refinement" tool, wherein, now that it knows the song is at 120bpm, you tell it to re analize, on chopping things into 16th notes..That would be a great and very USEFUL improvment...

David

[bongo_x]

Thanks for the input, any other opinions? If I were to go the Pro Tools route it would only be to edit the drums in Beat Detective, and then send the edited drums back to DP or Logic the rest of the way.

I'm trying to look at it like this, if I can spend about $400 for a piece of software (with free interface-Mbox) that can do the job in 10 minutes versus the 4 to 6 hours it now takes me to basically manually cut every beat on the grouped drum tracks, move them to the correct place, fill in the gap, do a crossfade.... and repeat and repeat and repeat.
BTW, if that is a stupid way of doing drum tightening, I'd love to hear a better way. Of course a better drummer, but sadly a lot of really good drummers get quantized these days, and in certain styles this has become a neccesary evil.

But of course if DP does it just as well for the price of the upgrade, than that's prol'y the way to go.

Again- Thank you.

Mitch

that's pretty much what I do for 30-50% of my living (in PT) and I've never used the beat detective. I know many do, but I'll tell you why I don't;

1. I don't trust it. like I don't trust sound replacer which works a good 80-90% of the time. that's not really good enough. many people have told me that it works "ok" but you have to go in and check it. I may be faster than most at drum fixing, but if I have to go in and check each edit I could just fix it manually in not much more time. because...

2. if I have to totally chop something I'm at least going to ATTEMPT to give it some life and feel. I have several different methods for doing this so hopefully everything doesn't sound the same. if for no other reason then at least so my (and the people I work for) stuff doesn't sound just like all the other stuff on the radio. many people I know joke about how you can hear the beat detective and auto tune on the radio and that has become the rule nowadays, not the exception it once was. IMHO using beat detective on a live drum track is like plugging auto tune in on auto mode and just letting it go.

if you spend enough time editing you will eventually get faster at it. it's boring and sucks the life out of you, but trying to find ways to make things groove and figuring out how the timing relationships actually work makes it more interesting. I have a completely different understanding of time and music than I did a few years ago.

I also work with people who don't want that totally quantized sound, but want things tightened up. sometimes it a challenge to find that middle ground. if you are working with someone who wants it to sound like your average pop/"punk" quantized-and-auto-tuned-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives sound then beat detective might be for you

get Quickeys.

bb

[Mr_Clifford]

Well put bongo_x!

[Dubnick]

I can only speak on Beat Detective LE and Beat Detective in PT since I haven't tried the Beat Detection in DP. Beat Detective does a great job, but just like with Auto-Tune, it's not something you can trust blindly - you still have to carefully listen for a funny fade points (clicks and pops) and it's still best to do a small number of measures at a time and to be very careful when doing fills. Beat Detective LE (which is what PT LE comes stock with) is set up to only be able to correct a single mono or stereo drum track at a time, which might be fine if your dealing with a drum loop or an already submixed kit, but obviously, being able to correct the entire kit at one time without a workaround is more ideal (there are a couple workarounds that work very well in using BD LE on a full kit - look it up in the DUC). One thing I would say is that it's definately a good idea to go into preferences and set Equal Power fades as the default as opposed to to equal gain - good idea in general and crucial if you want Beat Detectived drums to sound good. Hope that's of some help.