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Synching Challenge

I'v been a good boy and searched the forums for this but couldn't find it;

They said the Titanic was unsinkable, and they sank it with an icecube. I have a track of my own I want to synchronise with say a beat or something. The problem is it's a track played live without a metronome and the BPM varies up to +/-6 BPM!

I'm sure their are plenty who'v come across this problem, i'm surprised I couldn't find any threads.

Are their any functions in SX2 that let me quantisize and audio track with a variable time stretch depending on inserted markers? Without clicks and pops, I want a perfect synced version of the track.

kind regards,

Charlie Darwin

I'm not aware of any plugin or function that can do what you're saying "live" (perhaps Ableton has something). However, it's probably easier than you think to do it by hand - just cut the audio track every bar or every few bars (depending on just how much and how often the tempo varies) and use the timestretch tool on each slice to bring it to the track tempo.

Hey. What you are looking for is note quantization. I havent come across a host that doesnt allow this but its usualyl pretty easy to find when searching the help documents. Basicly it takes the notes and cuts them according to the beat you have set. Now, if you are doing this straight from an audio source, you may run into problems. The only sequencer I know that can quantize audio is Sonar but since Cubase is pretty similar, it may be able to do this as well.

Cheers,
Zac

He did say it was an audio track... so MIDI quantization isn't really going to help if that's the case.

Excuse me if I'm wrong, since I dont use cubase extensively, but isnt that what the hitpoints in audio tracks are for? Markers for quantising and stretching audio?

Hey. If its a single instrument, you can run it through Melodyne. Just about all you can do. Melodyne allows you to set a tempo and then have it quantize the notes over that time period. Sonar does do audio quantization but youd have to do a lot of hand editing and just like Melodyne, it needs to be a single instrument (or very clearly marked attacks). If I remember correctly, something similar to Melodynes function of audio single-note edits are possible in Sonar 5 but I dont have it and havent tried to demo yet.

Cheers,
Zac

quote:

Originally posted by Axolotyl Excuse me if I'm wrong, since I dont use cubase extensively, but isnt that what the hitpoints in audio tracks are for? Markers for quantising and stretching audio?

Yes, but it tends to be mostly used for loops. It usually doesn't calculate the hitpoints perfectly so you have to make a lot of adjustments. Even then, hitpoints are just a tool to facilitate or "automate" the chopping and timestretching mentioned earlier. So for short loops it's great, because you can get a 140 bpm loop down to 120 or vice versa with almost no audible loss of quality, but for an entire audio track I don't imagine it would be too useful, since you'd have to correct so many guesses that it would be more efficient to just do the whole thing by hand.

It's not really a "live" effect that leaves the original audio intact and stretches it in real time, it just speeds up the manual process a little if the loop is clean enough to make accurate guesses.

It's certainly one way of doing it though.

Tempomap it- or human quantize it.

I've been looking for a similar tool recently, so I can synchronise an ADR (voice dub) track precisely to the original audio of some footage in a short film I'm producing.

I'd be keen to see what you find...

Use ACID Pro's beatmatching wizard.

Seriously!

I'm pretty sure Ableton has a pretty extensive marking system. I haven't used it much, but from what I've seen, it can do a lot to quantize an uneven track. I don't know about how it does with the actual time-stretching, though. I'd have to try it myself.

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