We had a discussion a few days ago about Vegas projects that produce rapid fire slide-shows timed to the beat of an accompanying audio track. http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=886136&Replies=21[See here][/link]
This got me thinking about the Scope of the task of Automatically Generating markers at music beat locations. And that lead me to challenge myself to see if I could do it ..... WELL I DID!
I recently created a utility program called Playlist Tools for doing wonderful things with Audio Playlist files; so this seemed like a good place to host the beat detection functionality. I took my Playlist Tools program and added two new menu items. The first menu selection lets the user configure the analyzer settings for Bandwidth, Center Frequency, and Release Time; the second starts the beat detection analyzer on the selected file in the Playlist, to export all the beat locations to a text file as values in seconds.
Lastly I created a script DLL that imports and creates Markers from the locations written in the text file created by Playlist Tools. The Playlist Tools utility and Vegas DLL have been added to the Playlist Tools Setup program that can be downloaded from https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63993628/SonyVegas/SetupPlaylistTools104.exe?dl=1[here][/link]. Run the Setup program and it installs Playlist Tools and places the ImportMarkers script DLL in the ...\Documents\Vegas Script Menu folder. The script appears under the Vegas Tools / Scripting menu.
Keep in mind that this setup does not yet contain an update to the Playlist Tools Help file to include the Beat Detection capability. As such you'll have to fly the analyzers Beat detection settings by the seat of your pants. However, the default settings work very well for a variety of audio files that have distinctive sounding beats over the music. As the beats become more subtle, you'll have to tweak the configuration settings to find what works.
Finally, for full disclosure I've built this functionality using the BASS Audio Library which can be used for free in non-commercial products - which pretty much describes all the software I've written lately.
Enjoy ...
This got me thinking about the Scope of the task of Automatically Generating markers at music beat locations. And that lead me to challenge myself to see if I could do it ..... WELL I DID!
I recently created a utility program called Playlist Tools for doing wonderful things with Audio Playlist files; so this seemed like a good place to host the beat detection functionality. I took my Playlist Tools program and added two new menu items. The first menu selection lets the user configure the analyzer settings for Bandwidth, Center Frequency, and Release Time; the second starts the beat detection analyzer on the selected file in the Playlist, to export all the beat locations to a text file as values in seconds.
Lastly I created a script DLL that imports and creates Markers from the locations written in the text file created by Playlist Tools. The Playlist Tools utility and Vegas DLL have been added to the Playlist Tools Setup program that can be downloaded from https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63993628/SonyVegas/SetupPlaylistTools104.exe?dl=1[here][/link]. Run the Setup program and it installs Playlist Tools and places the ImportMarkers script DLL in the ...\Documents\Vegas Script Menu folder. The script appears under the Vegas Tools / Scripting menu.
Keep in mind that this setup does not yet contain an update to the Playlist Tools Help file to include the Beat Detection capability. As such you'll have to fly the analyzers Beat detection settings by the seat of your pants. However, the default settings work very well for a variety of audio files that have distinctive sounding beats over the music. As the beats become more subtle, you'll have to tweak the configuration settings to find what works.
Finally, for full disclosure I've built this functionality using the BASS Audio Library which can be used for free in non-commercial products - which pretty much describes all the software I've written lately.
Enjoy ...