Subject:Recording out of tempo....

Posted by: treblemaker

Date:4/28/2003 6:58:28 PM

I've been using Acid for a while now, and really like it, but am frustrated by a tempo issue that keeps recurring...

Many, not all, times when I am recording I get these green markers indicating "Recorded Measure 1", "Recorded Measure 2" etc. Inevitably, when I see these things, the recorded piece is at a slower tempo than the music I was recording along with. I'm sure I probably have something, somewhere, set incorrectly but can't figure out what. Any ideas?

I've tried turning Beatmapping on and off but it doesn't seem to improve things...

Thanks - John

Subject:RE: Recording out of tempo....

Reply by: [r]Evolution

Date:4/28/2003 8:51:36 PM

I'm having this same problem with my MIDI drifting off tempo.

Are you recording audio, midi, or both when this happens?

Have you tried the make recorded track follow project tempo...ON/OFF?


???,
Lamont

Subject:RE: Recording out of tempo....

Reply by: treblemaker

Date:4/28/2003 9:26:36 PM

Hey Lamont...

I'm recording audio and I've tried with the switch set both ways. These markers I'm talking about appear in the Chopper and when they do, nothing syncs up.

Hopefully, it'll just be an incorrect switch setting or something. Unfortunately, I haven't resolved it yet....

John

Subject:RE: Recording out of tempo....

Reply by: treblemaker

Date:4/29/2003 5:54:47 AM

Additional information....

The tracks I'm trying to sync up with are all one shots that are all in sync with themselves. I'm playing along with these tracks and it sounds fine to my ear in "real time" (while I'm recording). The problem happens when I play the song back. The new track is significantly out of time with the older material and even seems to be slightly "stretched". (I set the new track to be a one shot and have no stretching options set)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks - John

Subject:RE: Recording out of tempo....

Reply by: SonicJG

Date:4/29/2003 12:31:57 PM

Does the track sound proper on its own? Or does it sound like it's too low and too slow, or too high and too fast? If yes, there could be something strange going on with your recording sampling rates, but I'm a bit stumped with what is going on on your machine.

Actually, I think I may be now understanding what you may have happening: If your earlier files are, say, individual drum hits aligned with beats and measures, and your latest recording is one long vocal take for example, if you change the tempo of your song, the vocal take will definitely NOT match up with your drum hits because they're beat-aligned, whereas the vocal take will be rigid in time. If you change (or originally record) your vocal take to a beatmap, and correctly beatmap it to match up with the drum hits, it'd be in time.

The thing with long one-shots is to make sure that you don't change the tempo of the supporting material from underneath them. If you record your new take as a beatmapped file, it will inherit the tempo of the project, and have the downbeat in a sensible position. BTW, does your vocal take happen to cross tempo-changes by any chance?

HTH,
Joel

Subject:RE: Recording out of tempo....

Reply by: Iacobus

Date:4/29/2003 2:13:36 PM

In addition to what Joel said, could it be a recording latency issue? I know that with my beta Delta ASIO drivers for my Audiophile 2496, the take is always off about half a second no matter what I do. Two ways to get around it: Either manually set recording latency, or use WDM ("Windows Classic Wave").

HTH,
Iacobus

Subject:RE: Recording out of tempo....

Reply by: tneighbors

Date:4/29/2003 3:27:11 PM

Yeah, I was thinking latency as well. If you can free up some RAM or buy more, it might help. I had the same problem with my old computer. If you are spooling loops off of a CD, you might want to copy them to the HD so you don't do that. Also, cleaning up and defragmenting the HD might help. Any settings in the program that require less of your system could help also. Are the recorded takes coming in late in time with ticks in the recording? Does it start to happen more frequently when your project has more tracks in it. Thats what mine was doing. If I remember right, I don't think I ever corrected that problem before I got my new PC. Unfortunately I haven't tried Acid on my new machine yet. Sorry about that...maybe I'll get back to you on that. Hope that helps.

Subject:RE: Recording out of tempo....

Reply by: treblemaker

Date:4/30/2003 8:06:08 AM

Got the fix, but first, a little more background…

My band had recorded 14 tracks on a Fostex VF160 digital recorder. We wanted to see if we could port the tracks into Acid to allow us a little more flexibility in enhancing the wav files, add a new guitar solo and possibly re-do the vocal. We were able to save each track on the Fostex as a .wav file and burned it to CD using the built in recorder. I then moved the files over to my PC and put them in a new Acid project. Got the tracks to play in sync with each other by defining them as one offs, did some clean up and got a rough mix to get ready for the recording of the new tracks.

Now is probably a good time to mention that I’m running Acid Pro 4 on a Dell Precision, twin 400 Pentium II workstation with 256 meg of memory. Each of the 14 tracks for the 4 minute song was about 65 meg, so we’re talking just under a gig of music data. I’m thinking that I’m probably pushing the envelope a little bit here… So when you guys started talking about latency and performance, I thought that would be a good place to look.

What I did to resolve the issue was render the rough mix to a single .wav file an put it in its own Acid project JUST for recording any new tracks. Since the data in the project was significantly smaller, I did not experience any of the “off-tempo” problems I had had before. I quickly knocked off about 10 lead guitar intros, picked the best and sweetened it up, opened up the old 14 track monster project, inserted the new track and everything was fine and in time.

I know the disclaimer from Sound Forge is that Acid is not meant to be a multi-track recorder, but I find that it works extremely well for that as long as you can figure out how to work within its limitations. It is by far the most intuitive, flexible and easy to use product I’ve found.

Thanks for the help guys!

John

Subject:RE: Recording out of tempo....

Reply by: SonicJG

Date:4/30/2003 6:32:39 PM

John-

Thanks for reporting back that things work, and the kind words. I'd say you're partially right about ACID working as a suitable multitrack (for playback). If you turn all of the media into one-shots, and leave the tempo settings alone, it can certainly be used as a stripped-down version of Vegas. Of course, ACID's forte lies somewhere else. :)

FWIW, your system sounds like it should be able to handle the project you've got just fine, as long as you don't throw too many effects at it. With streaming 14 tracks (stereo or mono?), I'd look at profiling the disk-throughput with something like SiSoft Sandra, to see at what stage that might become a bottleneck. I know you mentioned on another post something about getting a Xeon. If you've got dough to blow, maybe, but I'd consider the extra outlay for a Xeon to amount to diminishing returns. I'd spend the extra on making sure I got a good motherboard/chipset, which might take a bit of research, but could prove worth the effort.

Just my two cents.

HTH,
Joel