I am trying to work with Guitar recordings. I get the concept of a Click Track. When I get a few measures the way I like them, I am trying to copy and move, etc. I can’t seem to select the “EXACT” measure. It seems like there should be a way to select a full measure without zooming in and trying to get it exactly?
Thanks,
cboshdave
You can’t snap to beats.
You could label the beats using Analyze > Silence Finder… (reduce “Minimum duration of silence” and set “Label placement” to zero or a very small positive number like 0.005). Then you can drag select to the labels.
Even that isn’t perfect at zero “label placement”, because the first beat if you recorded accurately would then not be included in the selection.
You can select exact lengths without zooming in (if you work out the length you want) using Selection Toolbar .
Gale
Topic moved to “Adding Features”.
Currently it is possible to “snap to” any of the available time units, but there are no time units for Bars/beats. (http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/selection_toolbar.html#snap)
There is also a weak “magnetic” effect when selecting to the edge of a clip boundary, or to a label position: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/boundary_snap_guides.html
I wrote a plug-in that can generate labels (http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/label_tracks.html) at bar and beat positions. While this is not a full replacement for bars and beats as time units, it can be useful as a guide. The plug-in is available here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/beat-per-minute-labels/20785/1 If you find it useful or have any questions regarding it, please comment in that topic.
Audacity has a primitive “beat detection” effect that creates labels: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/beat_finder.html
Unfortunately it does not work very well. “Improved beat detection” could probably be counted as a feature request vote if that is what you want.
I assume it’s impossible with current Nyquist (or would risk a crash by keeping data in memory) but ideally (IMO) a Click Track generator would have an option to simultaneously generate labels at the beats (or bars).
Gale
Currently Nyquist plug-ins can only return one “result”. We can have a plug-in that returns a click track. We can have a plug-in that returns labels. We can’t currently have a Nyquist plug-in that returns a click track and labels at the same time. There could be an option in “Generate > Click Track…” to produce either an audio track (as now) or a label track (like the “Beat Per Minute labels” plug-in), but the “Click Track” plug-in already has rather a lot of controls and there is not much room for more.
Could “Generate Labels” not be a new “Action Choice” instead of a separate control?
MIDI pitch could be one control. Just make users enter the strong and weak values in one box:
"MIDI pitch of strong and weak clickn[separate the values with a space]"
I don’t know if anyone else can, but I can’t discern differences between noise q’s one unit apart. If four noise resonances were acceptable, they could become another three noise choices in “Click Sound”.
Gale
Yes it could. That could be a neat feature if we wanted to add labels as an option.
Perfectly doable, though experience with “Vocal Remover” suggests that users sometime have difficulty with space separated values in one text box.
There seems to be a more noticeable difference when “noise” is selected as the “Click Sound”.
More choice for click sounds has previously been requested, particularly for sounds similar to “metronome” sounds in other software. I think this will be worth considering when we get round to updating the Click Track plug-in.