Timing

[Rotter Bank]

Hello everyone! We have been editing the timing on our projects and to do this we’ve turned audiosnap on to manually move each note using the transient markers.  This would be great however the tempo keeps automatically changing (you can’t guarantee that playing/editing will be in time). Does anyone know how to stop audiosnap automatically changing the tempo without turning audiosnap off? If there is also an easier way to edit without using the transient markers or quantising please let us know.  Thankyou so much. By the way this is real audio and not MIDI.

[Glenn Stanton]

make sure you are set to "clip follows project" and not "set project to clip"

[Byron Dickens]

Audiosnap is best used on short clips and even then it takes a lot of trial and error and manual editing to get usable results. Just slapping it on a whole track and expecting magic is a recipe for disappointment.

[OutrageProductions]

Tedious is an understatment.

Just a couple days ago I had a client that wanted to "iron out" a mixed audio track so that it was consistent tempo... which varied from 89.4bpm down to around 84.2bpm multiple times in the first 3 minutes and then at 4:11 finally ended up clamping at 112bpm.
Took me about 4 hours... client got what they paid for tho.

[Byron Dickens]

Black Sabbath and their radical tempo changes didn't need no stinkin' Audiosnap!

Of course, they did it on purpose.

 

Edited September 9, 2023 by Byron Dickens

[sjoens]

48 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

Of course, they did it on porpoise.

fixed  

[John Vere]

Yes, Audio snap was another feature I gave a hearty heave ho few years ago.  I had spent ( waisted) hours and hours on and it all ended up being a huge mess. Pilot error no doubt,  I watched the videos and kept returning to them but gave up as being either over my head or possibly a stupid design.

I have two way better methods I will use for a track that has timing errors. 

1- Melodyne- it's absolutely brilliant at moving notes around without artifacts. I only work in sort sections and render when done. Whiles its open you can also adjust amplitude and of course pitch. Three important ways to clean up a track. 

2-Split the track at the note and drag it to the correct place. Turn off Snap to grid. When I'm done I tend to export the track as a stem at 48/32 and then bring it back to replace the messy looking track I created.  

Edited September 9, 2023 by JohnnyV

[T Boog]

1 hour ago, JohnnyV said:

When I'm done I tend to export the track as a stem at 48/32 and then bring it back to replace the messy looking track I created. 

That's a good idea John. I need to try that. Esp since I tell friends that I nail everything on the first take. I'd hate to get caught in a lie 🙃

[mettelus]

Another option is to use "Set Measure/Beat at Now." As long as the stems align, you can TAB to transient (a drum track is best for this) and using SM/BAN "anchors" the timeline to what you specify. Depending on drift, you may need to do it more often (to get a steady curve), but if pretty close every couple of bars is most common. Be sure to anchor the start of the clip as well or it can go weird if you backtrack to make changes. This doesn't modify the audio in any way, it just pins beats to where you choose. Set the tempo to something close before starting, then when you use SM/BAN (hotkey is Shift-M) it will auto-fill the value more precisely.

Just realized TAB to transient is no longer default, but in the help file there is a quick blurb on how to re-enable that.

[Glenn Stanton]

or just have them play it right in the first place 🙂 

[Lord Tim]

6 minutes ago, Glenn Stanton said:

or just have them play it right in the first place 🙂 

Get out of here with that crazy talk! 🤨

[John Bradley]

Indeed! Who's got time for that, there's product to ship!

[Glenn Stanton]

2 hours ago, John Bradley said:

Indeed! Who's got time for that, there's product to ship!

so, then just be quiet and press the "fix it" button and move on!  🙂 people (you know who they are) are only listening to 30-45 seconds at a time anyways via their phone speaker or via the mini BT speakers, to share with their friends who are all sms'ing anyways...

Edited September 9, 2023 by Glenn Stanton

[John Vere]

If I can cheat—/- I cheat. Midi most certainly taught me that.  Now I’m figuring out how to do the same with audio.   
But in the end I do the cheating and hate the result so pick up my guitar and a shot of whiskey and then nail it in the first take because that 6 hours of editing to get what I was after is now deeply embedded in my brain.  
I have no qualms about deleting 6 hours of work if I don’t like it. That’s how you achieve stardom like me. Well, at least my dog seems to like my music. 

[T Boog]

1 hour ago, JohnnyV said:

If I can cheat—/- I cheat

Amen John. However, I don't look at it as cheating. And if it is, then the studio has always been about cheating. Just the ability to do a second take is technically  cheating. You can't do that live. And how long have people been doing punch ins,  cutting tape, etc?

No, I view being a musician like being a NASCAR mechanic. The studio is the garage where we're EXPECTED to build an outstanding car because everyone knows we have the luxury of time & lots of tools. And we HAVE to build an outstanding car to compete because every other pro is using those exact same advantages.

 Now playing live, that's our race day where we show how well we handle the pressure of the pit with no second chances. But the beauty is, unlike the studio, no one is expecting perfection live. We just need to show that we're not all smoke & mirrors. Even from the pros, we expect to hear a few off notes, tempo fluctuations, etc. Which is why even live albums are almost always doctored.

Btw, Tom Scholz of Boston is a big hero of mine. In one of his interviews on youtube he points to a few TALL stacks of cut tape. He says that those are all just the drum edits for the song Don't Look Back. Not the whole album, just one song. He follows that by saying, 'I'll do whatever it takes to get the sound I'm hearing in my head".

Bottom line, if editing is cheating then I'd guess around 90% of pro musicians belong in jail. (Even if their producers did the dirty work)

[John Bradley]

Absolutely. It’s all about achieving the end result. No one, other than other musicians & engineers, cares how hard or easy the process was, as long as the result is interesting in some way.

Look at how much more depth there was to music of the early ‘70s when 24-track machines were a thing (thinking specifically of Genesis, Yes, Floyd) compared to what was attainable a mere decade earlier when the Beatles were basically recording live in studio to mono or 2-track.

Was that cheating? Who cares. It’s lovely music that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.

[Bass Guitar]

I mostly record our bands live gigs, No amount of cheating would ever make those recordings something you would release commercially. But we get a kick out of listening to our progress over time. And our friends and  families think it just great.

Live recordings are what they are and I myself will often listen and enjoy those recordings of well known bands and I could give a S--t about the recording quality and the mistakes. The vibe and energy are way more important to me. A good song is a good song even played on a lo fi cassette player in a 1882 car. 

[T Boog]

On 9/9/2023 at 10:00 PM, John Bradley said:

No one, other than other musicians & engineers, cares how hard or easy the process was

Good point. And of course, those same musicians & engineers are pretty much all using those same tools too.

It's kinda like steroids in pro bodybuilding. It's not cheating cause they all do it. It's become standard practice. They just don't brag on it.

Editing music has been the standard industry practice for decades now. Pretty much every album we love was edited in multiple ways to save time & money and showcase the songs in their best light. Those are all good things.

 

[Lord Tim]

The thing about music is it's art and it's entirely subjective. It's not a competition as to who is being the "most honest."  I'd be fairly upset if I was watching, say, a talent show and it was revealed later that the singer was using real-time autotune on their voice rather than competing fairly in the competition, but this is NOT a competition... if this is a recording and someone feels that this is the sound they want on their voice, who are we to argue? That's THEIR art, and we can choose to like it or not. Same goes for adjusting timing.

You also have to wonder where the line is too.

"I didn't use any studio tricks to get this recording... well, except for mic placement to get it sounding nice, compression to even out the levels, EQ to add some presence to the sound, reverb to make it sound more spacious, tape compression to give it some grit and then mixed it in with everything else in a flattering way. But other than that's this is EXACTLY HOW I PERFORMED IT IN THE ROOM."

I'm still pretty firmly in the camp that just because you CAN fix stuff, it doesn't mean you SHOULD fix it. Some stuff just works better a little bit looser. Perfect is the enemy of greatness. But if perfect is the goal of the artist, then why not use the tools we have to get us there? And it's exactly right what was said earlier - absolutely NOBODY cares that you spent 10 months trying to nail that one drum part to be exactly on the beat as opposed to 20 minutes fixing it with software. It's how the listener feels at the end of the day. For a studio recording, both things are absolutely valid!

[HOOK]

On 9/8/2023 at 8:08 PM, JohnnyV said:

2-Split the track at the note and drag it to the correct place. Turn off Snap to grid. When I'm done I tend to export the track as a stem at 48/32 and then bring it back to replace the messy looking track I created.  

I use a version of this trick.  Turn off snap when cutting the clip so you can cut directly at the transient. Once it's cut you can turn snap on again and use the stretch tool (F8 - or long hold on "edit" on the tool module) and then you can snap both ends of the cut clip to the grid.  It's all manual...but it's perfect.

[David Baay]

On 9/8/2023 at 2:36 PM, Glenn Stanton said:

make sure you are set to "clip follows project" and not "set project to clip"

It's true that "Set Project from Clip" is the one thing in Audiosnap that can actually change the project tempo map, so executing that that would likely be the cause of the problem. But enabling 'Clip Follows Project' can cause other issues if it's in the wrong mode, and shouldn't be necessary if the OP just wants to manually drag transients around. All that's needed is to enable Audiosnap to show the transient markers and probably raise the Threshold slider to hide some superfluous markers that typically show at the 50% default.