Hi all! First time poster - thanks for being patient with me. I have used Audacity for many years, and one of the features I’ve found extremely useful in recent updates is the “beats and bars” functionality which allows me to see beats and bars in the timeline according to the tempo set for the project, and to drag clips around so they snap to the nearest beat or bar according to the snapping settings.
This is a great feature! There is one thing that is missing from it which I would find very useful and, no doubt, many others would too - a feature which is standard in more full featured DAWs including Cubase and Logic.
As a user working with clips, I’d like to add a “pick up bar” or anacrusis to the start of my project, allowing me to create beats and bars which are considered prior in time to the first bar (bar 0) for the purposes of the timeline.
Who would use this: most anyone, I should imagine - it’s a very common requirement in both recorded and electronic production. The word “anacrusis” is itself attested from the 19th Century - they appear in many recorded tracks available for purchase to the public.
My specific use case is a bit unusual: I use Audacity to do “mixes”, i.e. long-play format recordings composed of existing tracks with transitions between them. In electronic music, it is very common for major events (“breakdowns” and “drops”) to be found at “power of two” bar counts (at bar 16, 32, 64, 128, and so on), and listeners unconsciously expect these kinds of patterns. As such, lining these up is a lot easier if the timeline has recognisable sums of these numbers (72, 96 and so on) highlighted, as per the default behaviour. If the track at the start of the mix has an upbeat, this throws the entire mix off for this purpose.