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To good to be true?


Anders Madsen

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I received a guitar track from a guitarist with an idea he said was recorded at 120 bpm.
So I imported the file, and inserted some midi drums.. Was not quite 120 bpm.  :)
I then dragged the "irregular" guitartrack onto the timeline.  ...calculating..
And I now had a slightly different AND dynamic tempo map. Drums following nicely.
Only tried it once, so I am insecure. I never could imagine this would be possible.
Is it?
Or am I experiencing a lucky coincidence?

Edited by Anders Madsen
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3 hours ago, Colin Nicholls said:

Must have Melodyne installed; must be standard .wav file; other than that it sound magic.

Thanks for pointing out the Melodyne requirement. Although I do have Melodyne Essential installed, always just assumed that was a function of ARA support built into Cakewalk, because I never saw Melodyne launch during the clip drag to timeline.

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Both drag to timeline for tempo map creation and drag to instrument/midi track for audio to MIDI conversion rely on the Melodyne VST3 plug-in and CbB ARA support. The good news for those who do not have a Melodyne license is the monophonic version of these features are supported even after the Melodyne demo expires

 

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7 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

AFAIK, Cakewalk by BandLab and Ableton Live are the only programs that can conform to tempo so easily, although they use different approaches. I use Cakewalk to analyze tempos from "classic recordings" - the results are very interesting.

been trying to explain the benefits of tempo mapping for years .. this is a great example thanks :)

 

 

edit:- Worth looking into how Samplitude and Harrison Mixbus handle it (much better than sonar imo)

Edited by Rooooooo
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I was working on replicating a favorite vocal-only track and had the hardest time tempo matching it last weekend, not being able to figure out a way and I came across this post this evening.  So I opened up that project and did this drag-to-the-timeline of the whole audio track of the audio I had imported.

Not.  Even.  Close.  

The audio has claps all the way through it, so I was surprised that AudioSnap and this method completely failed the test.  I expected it would lock onto those obvious transients and come up with something that was at least in the ballpark.

If I just put a single temple on it at about 154.75, it works for some period of time and then falls off.  If I use this method, I get a tempo starting at 77.58 and varying somewhere around that for much of the song, topping out in one section at about 115bpm.

How can this be SO far off.  There's not a single spot I can turn on the metronome and it is even vaguely in the same tempo - not a half-time, not a double-time...nothing.  Completely off.

Am I missing something obvious here?

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Could be the algorithm Melodyne is using. Melodyne Essential and Assistant only work with monophonic audio. Editor and Studio can work with polyphonic audio. May need to open the clip as a Region FX and determine the best algorithm.

 

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Also... It's probably not coincidental that 77.58 is almost exactly half of 154.75.    As though it's picking up transients (the claps?) as quarter notes and they're not?   Just guessing though - as scook wrote the Melodyne algorithm could be coming into play.

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14 hours ago, Blades said:

I was working on replicating a favorite vocal-only track and had the hardest time tempo matching it last weekend, not being able to figure out a way and I came across this post this evening.  So I opened up that project and did this drag-to-the-timeline of the whole audio track of the audio I had imported.

Not.  Even.  Close.  

The audio has claps all the way through it, so I was surprised that AudioSnap and this method completely failed the test.  I expected it would lock onto those obvious transients and come up with something that was at least in the ballpark.

If I just put a single temple on it at about 154.75, it works for some period of time and then falls off.  If I use this method, I get a tempo starting at 77.58 and varying somewhere around that for much of the song, topping out in one section at about 115bpm.

How can this be SO far off.  There's not a single spot I can turn on the metronome and it is even vaguely in the same tempo - not a half-time, not a double-time...nothing.  Completely off.

Am I missing something obvious here?

This has to do with the very poor transient detection of Melodyne. You must know I like Melodyne and I often use it, but I have learned that I have to revise about 60 to 70% of the detected transients in the note assignment mode. Afterwards everything runs fine. But it is an illusion that the program itself detects the notes automatically (it's Celemony's fairy tale). Even when I've used a very simple and constantly played bass track I noticed that Melodyne sets the transients not at the same place for each note, it is very annoying!

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14 hours ago, scook said:

Could be the algorithm Melodyne is using. Melodyne Essential and Assistant only work with monophonic audio. Editor and Studio can work with polyphonic audio. May need to open the clip as a Region FX and determine the best algorithm.

I've also found the algorithm you choose makes a difference. However, I haven't found any "rule" about which algorithm to use, other than "if one doesn't produce correct results, try a different one."

In general, Melodic seems to work best. But with some music, the only way to get the desired results was with the Percussive one. "Universal" isn't so universal :)

Edited by Craig Anderton
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I didn't really even realize that it was using Melodyne for this - I would have expected it was AudioSnap derived.  I created a region for the thing in Melodyne and tried the different algorithms.  None was really any better than the others.  The tempo was still "about half" but still not close at all.  I even tried fiddling with the location of the audio track in the session, placing the claps right on the 2 and 4 and even at half-time (ish), it didn't align enough to be useful.  I wasn't really "needing" this anyway, as I was just trying to have a reference and it IS an acapella thing, but I was hopeful I might be able to reproduce it and then add some drums and have some hope of a grid.

In the end, I'm not vocally talented enough (apparently) to pull the song off anyway!  The lead is fine, but I just can't find the backup harmonies and the bass is too low, which I might try harder to manipulate with tools (like sampler or melodyne or something) if the rest were tolerable.  I'm sure I will try again.

Damn that Todd Rundgren!

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Hmmmm, just stumbled across this (the thread heading hooked me in) and I seem to be doing this wrong. Have inserted a suitably feel-filled guitar part, (a stereo 16 bit wav) and keep trying to drag it into timeline and nothing happens. Audio snap acting similarly. (I have Melodyne installed, up to date Cakewalk) this would be great if it worked as my big bugbear band-wise is demos with wandering time as we pass them around the band - they get to me and I have to add drums and it can be quite trying.

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6 hours ago, Al Murray said:

Hmmmm, just stumbled across this (the thread heading hooked me in) and I seem to be doing this wrong. Have inserted a suitably feel-filled guitar part, (a stereo 16 bit wav) and keep trying to drag it into timeline and nothing happens. Audio snap acting similarly. (I have Melodyne installed, up to date Cakewalk) this would be great if it worked as my big bugbear band-wise is demos with wandering time as we pass them around the band - they get to me and I have to add drums and it can be quite trying.

have you done any editing to the wav? .. it kinda works best if you bounce the track out,then drag that onto the timeline ...

 

the other thing  is - sonar kinda expects the tempo to be "in time" .. hard to explain,it puts a stretched grid on the audio,it doesn't like it at all if your track has and extra little "beat" which is murder if your trying to do something like this

 

 

 

smellydin crashes sometimes too :D

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On 2/6/2020 at 6:03 PM, Blades said:

f I just put a single temple on it at about 154.75, it works for some period of time and then falls off.  If I use this method, I get a tempo starting at 77.58 and varying somewhere around that for much of the song, topping out in one section at about 115bpm.

Aaaaargh! This is one of my personal peeves, if it is the case with Melodyne.

When I am running an analysis program, and I kind of know where the data are going to fall, how about the program lets me do some of the heavy lifting before we start and I can tell it that for instance the song is definitely not going to wander beyond 150-160BPM? So then it can filter out glitch results like 78BPM. So that it can focus its powerful detection algorithm in that range rather than figuring out everything from 1BPM to 250BPM.

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