Suggestion: Identify tempo without changing it

Suggestion for future versions / bug fixes:

Should be able to change the project tempo (status bar, lower left corner) and NOT actually change the tempo of the tracks.

Rationale: Setting the tempo for a new / empty project is a no-brainer. But I went to identify the tempo of an existing project and it actually changed the tempo of the music. Oops! Should be a way to have cake and eat it too, maybe with some coffee :slight_smile:

Post-script: Creating a new project with the correct tempo and copying / pasting a track from the old project with wrong tempo to the new empty project with correct tempo does not work. As of this post, there seems to be no workaround.

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I’ve got a better one: How about Audacity automatically identifies what tempo and time signature the song in question?

Hmm…Could get into a long philosophical discussion on this and someone with deeper audio tech knowledge than me might chime in.

But I think there is a fine line between technology truly helping me (e.g., automating something repetitive) vs. thinking it knows better than me. Every time my iPhone wants to be helpful and remind me to follow-up on some email I want to help my iPhone by throwing it in the trash.

So I do agree, but would not want to give up the ability to set the tempo myself, especially for songs with multiple tempi, fermatas, etc.

That would be a nice feature, but there still needs to be a reasonable way to manually adjust the tempo without affecting the audio?

  • Example: Automatic tempo detection is not infallible, so the user should be able to correct the detected tempo.
  • Example: The music may have multiple parts with different tempos. Given that Audacity 3.4.0 only supports one tempo per project, the tempo (and bar lines) will need to be changed frequently according to which part is being worked on.

@LWinterberg It would also be useful if there were some way that Nyquist could know what the project tempo and time signature are (for example, with a property list). It would then be possible to create a modified version of Rhythm Track that automatically generates a click track that matches the project’s tempo and time signature (could be very handy for creating a click track for live recording).

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