Feature Request: Bar Creation Adjustments

[atstubradley]

As far as bar creation goes, the beat detection works pretty good. Although I haven't tried the Audacity creation/import of bars I did think of a feature that may be of use to some:

Manually-adjustable BPM in the bar generation window.

As of the latest build, when you detect the beat of a song it gives you the analysis of BPM and millisecond output per bar but does not allow you to adjust it. For example, I did a beat detection on "This Is Halloween" by Danny Elfman and the detected BPM was 166.5. The actual BPM of the song is 167. This allowed for alignment of effects to the generated output of bars but also caused timing issues due to the .5 BPM delta of the beat detection. If we had a way to manually input the known BPM and create bars based on the known BPM this could alleviate timing errors. Thank you for your consideration for this feature request.

 

[jchuchla]

The bar and beat detection is actually smarter than you're assuming it is. It uses a pretty advanced audio analysis library and actually puts the marks on the actual bars/beats. It doesn't simply create marks based on an averaged BPM of the whole song. If you have a song with variations in tempo (the majority of songs), the bars will actually be created in the correct spot with respect to the localized tempo. The BPM in the window is just an average and i'm pretty sure it's only there for show. Granted it doesn't always work perfectly, but overall, it's pretty darn accurate.

I wouldn't think a fixed BPM would be very useful in a real world scenario. Very few songs have a rigid fixed tempo. I would certainly be fairly simple to create such a tool. I think we actually had it in there prior to the mark system upgrades. Though I don't think it'd be very useful.