Advice on song timing marks

[jalder]

Hello all, I'm looking for some advice on getting or creating Vixen 3 timing marks for songs. I switched from Light-o-rama to Vixen about a decade ago, but I've never really been able to crack music sequences in Vixen. In Light-o-rama, you used to be able to find sites sharing sequences, where I found the timing marks the most valuable because no two house set-ups are the same. Is there something similar for Vixen? We've mostly been happy with animated sequences without music, but I'd like to try music again for a better display. I've tried the beats and bar detection and the dozens of VAMP audacity plug-ins, but I've never been all that happy with the results. They often create far too many marks. I hand made a few Light-o-rama sequences I couldn't find online, but it was an incredibly slow process listening to the song in sections or trying to match the timing of the waveform peaks.

So, in 2021, how do folks approach song timing marks in Vixen 3? Do you use the built in beats and bar detection and manually tweak it from there? Do you somehow import Vixen 2 timing files from forums or online sharing sites? Or do you use the slow and steady way of doing it all manually by listening to the song at half speed and just make your own mark collection from scratch?

Thanks

 

[jchuchla]

The built in beats and bar detection is really good for most songs. I rarely use anything but that as my timing reference. Occasionally I'll import marks that were generated with the more advanced detection tools in Audacity. Note Onset detection is one of those that sometimes works really well, and sometimes not so much.
I haven't run into a situation where the beat and bar detector creates too many marks. It creates exactly what it should, bar, beat and split beat if you select that. And it puts them in appropriate mark collections. You can enable and disable each of those collections as you desire so that you're only working with what you need at any given time. Most of the time I'll enable all of the options so it generates them all and only show the relevant ones at any given time.

There is also a Vixen 3 Sequence sharing group on facebook. https://www.facebook.com/groups/3801138629943646