Exact synchronising music beat to slide

[jevans]

I have made many shows where the slides change on the exact beat of the accompanying music. Currently I am using some music where identifying the beginning of a bar is a bit difficult. Although you can expand a music track vertically via Crtl + shift + mouse wheel, you can only expand the track so far and, with this music, it does not amplify the waveform enough. Even a horizontal expand is not very useful. I have tried identfying the bar positions using Audition, but it is rather difficult to do if the speed of the music varies as this track does.

Anyone got any good tips for identifying the start of bars on a music track?

[Barry Beckham]

Your going to think I am taking the p___ here, but I am not.

You have to use your eyes and ears to tell you when it's right. Use the time line and just move the image a fraction either way till it looks and sounds correct. Then watch what you have done a number of times over a few days to be sure.

[denisb]

With an old microphone and Audacity, while listening the music , I record the beat by tapping with a fingernail on the microphone .

I put this track "beat" in addition to the normal music in PTE and mute it. In the timeline mode, you get :

This help me to synchronise music and slides.

Denis

[Guest Yachtsman1]

I have made many shows where the slides change on the exact beat of the accompanying music. Currently I am using some music where identifying the beginning of a bar is a bit difficult. Although you can expand a music track vertically via Crtl + shift + mouse wheel, you can only expand the track so far and, with this music, it does not amplify the waveform enough. Even a horizontal expand is not very useful. I have tried identfying the bar positions using Audition, but it is rather difficult to do if the speed of the music varies as this track does.

Anyone got any goo tips for identifying the start of bars on a music track?

I did a tutorial on this subject last year, it uses a mixture of PTE & Audacity. It came about while compiling a show called "Radio "Lady" Gaga, which as the title suggests is composed of pictures of Lady Gaga set to Queen's "Radio Gaga". The music has a double beat which changes many times over its length. It was during the making of the show I found Audacities "Beat Finder" which can be found under the Analyze tab. It took me a long time to get the slide changes (transitions) to align correctly, I finally used PTE's function of adding them on the fly, which is explained in the tutorial. In this instance it "did matter" that the alignment was spot on.

Eric

Yachtsman1.

[jevans]

Thank you all gentlemen for your responses.

Barry, this is what I do at present. I used to play in an orchestra and have quite a good musical ear but this method is quite time consuming.

Denis : I like this idea and will give it a try.

Eric : There is a similar function in Audition but it is quite complicated and I have not got it to work properly yet. Will try Audacity.

[MUR]

Hi Jevans

I know this is not a solution, but sometimes it is useful, I open the music in Audacity, decreased the rate by half (runs at half the real speed), then active "add tag (labels)" and with the ear very attentive and ctrl-m, mark the points.

Then I export the tags file, which is a text file with the times that I will use for slides.

MUR

[Barry Beckham]

I am a little baffled here, because I have found that you cannot always place an image directly on that one peak in the music without it being slightly off visually. While it's drifting off the point a little, if you use a long fade transition and try to match it to the peak/sweet point of the music, the image often needs to be half a second before that music peak.

The reason is, that the longer fade and/or the two images are of a type that one image masks the other a little as they change. The image can require a fraction of a second to become visible and therefore register on our eyes. Many, many times I have had to move an image left a fraction so that my eyes and ears told me it was right, while looking at it visually, it looked wrong

Am I the only person who has found this? I doubt it.

[jevans]

Barry: I experience the same problem. I just take the view that the slide transition should start on the beat. If you get a short sharp note, I sometimes make the transition either instantaneous or very short. But I am not too keen on this.

Mur : Thanks for your reply. I am not too familiar with Audacity and could not get this to work correctly although I see exactly what you are doing. If I pause the cursor at the beat, I seem to have to re-position it in the "label" track in order to add a label. Could you be a bit more specific about the procedure please?

[JudyKay]

Beatfinder in Audacity sometimes works, but often not. Fiddling to create a click track to get the timing right sometimes works as well. All depends on the music.

Barry, you are right, that sometimes some readjustment is needed. But sometimes at least, aligning to the beat is right on or close enough for a good start and later do some minor readjustment by eye and ear.

[MUR]

Hi

In Audacity, hold the Control key and every time you want to make a point hit the "m" key and then export the file.

MUR

file.txt

[Barry Beckham]

I am not trying to be difficult here, but surely if you can do that in Audacity, why can't you tap your finger in PTE and add the image to the timeline at the same time (Insert Key)

[Lin Evans]

Hi Barry,

You could, but I think what Mur is getting at is that there would be then a "reference" point in the audacity file which one could use as a pointer to "fine tune" the position of the image but with just adding the image via the timeline you would have slightly less visual help. Maybe I'm understanding this wrong, but I thought the idea of the audacity file was to temporarily have two identical audio tracks. The one from audacity would be only used to set the image timing and would then be deleted?

Best regards,

Lin

[Barry Beckham]

Thank you for that explanation. I think I understand now, silly me

[jevans]

Thanks for all the suggestions and comments which have been interesting and helpful. What I was hoping to do was import a music track into an editor (e.g. Audacity or Audition) and get the program to annotate the bar positions. I have tried various method, incuding the suggestion from Eric to use the beat finder. However no method seems to produce an accurate result, probably due to speed variations which fool the timing mechanism. I will just continue with the "by ear" method mentioned by Barry at the beginning of the thread. After all, as he so clearly pointed out, if you have a long slide transmission, then it is difficult to tell where the next image starts.

[MUR]

He all

I used the shortcut key, in which all slides except the number 1 are moved to the right end of the timeline, start playing the music and then every time the key is pressed, the next slide is moved to the site where the musici s at the time.

It is very good for a first approximation but I forgot which is the key.

Please someone that can refresh my mind

MUR

[Guest Yachtsman1]

He all

I used the shortcut key, in which all slides except the number 1 are moved to the right end of the timeline, start playing the music and then every time the key is pressed, the next slide is moved to the site where the musici s at the time.

It is very good for a first approximation but I forgot which is the key.

Please someone that can refresh my mind

MUR

Hi Mur

Check my post 4 in this thread.

Eric

Yachtsman1.

[MUR]

That is(+).

Thanks Yachtsman1.

MUR