Warping

Tim Robbins

Hi,
I was just messing around with Ableton and a thought struck me, why exactly do the mp3s need to be warped? I could understand if it's old vinly when there would be very minor fluctuations in the tempo.

But what about new tracks taken straight from MP3 or WAV. Surely these should be exactly the same tempo from beginning to end?

I also understand that the first beat is never at the zeroth second but usually slightly off. But even when you mark the 1st beat you have to scan through the song to make sure the other beats are marked.

Is it because it's impossible for a software system to get the BPM accurately?

For example, ableton can estimate a song to be 123 BPM but in fact it might be:

123.2345 BPM

Comments welcomed!

tman

That's the one thing that pisses me off about Ableton... Surely by the seventh iteration of their product they should have been able to accurately figure out the warping of full tracks automatically.

It can't be that hard to just start at the first beat and work from there???

seannash

i havent used ableton in along time but id say the reason you get bpms of .1254 and the likes is because the programme is trying to calculate the bpms of the whole file.some tracks have a second of silence in the begining and end of them so it probably throws it off a bit.
anyway its not a big deal really.
dont really think its grounds for a huge discussion really;)

Tim Robbins

seannash wrote: »

i havent used ableton in along time but id say the reason you get bpms of .1254 and the likes is because the programme is trying to calculate the bpms of the whole file.some tracks have a second of silence in the begining and end of them so it probably throws it off a bit.
anyway its not a big deal really.
dont really think its grounds for a huge discussion really;)

It's the nerd getting the better of me. I did electronic engineering sme years back and studied DSP etc.

I can understand the first beat thing and the other poster is correct, it should be able to pick this up.

However, what I still don't get why the rest of the track needs to be manually warped after the first down beat has been marked.

old gregg

if all the drums in a track are electronic then it's reasonably likely that ableton will take a fair stab at getting the beats right on the basis that subsequent beats will be at mathematically even intervals. Where it all goes a little interesting is where the drums contain the work of humans and the beats will almost certainly have periods where the drumming slows down and speeds up due to the way humans don't drum 100% consistently (even Dave Grohl gets tired ). Thats' a reason why Ableton won't get the beats right in many cases.

Tim Robbins

old gregg wrote: »

if all the drums in a track are electronic then it's reasonably likely that ableton will take a fair stab at getting the beats right on the basis that subsequent beats will be at mathematically even intervals. Where it all goes a little interesting is where the drums contain the work of humans and the beats will almost certainly have periods where the drumming slows down and speeds up due to the way humans don't drum 100% consistently (even Dave Grohl gets tired ). Thats' a reason why Ableton won't get the beats right in many cases.

The stuff I'm warping is all electronic dance. And Ableton is way off.
I'd be quicker beat mixing than using it's warping.

old gregg

indeed, and I've seen it get even basic minimal techno wrong, it's just the theory anyway. I've found it invariably gets the first beat wrong but once I place the first marker and warp from there it's reasonably close ... but I've never had to rely on Ableton for this so would recognise that it may come up short when used in the field

seannash

old gregg wrote: »

if all the drums in a track are electronic then it's reasonably likely that ableton will take a fair stab at getting the beats right on the basis that subsequent beats will be at mathematically even intervals. Where it all goes a little interesting is where the drums contain the work of humans and the beats will almost certainly have periods where the drumming slows down and speeds up due to the way humans don't drum 100% consistently (even Dave Grohl gets tired ). Thats' a reason why Ableton won't get the beats right in many cases.

most electronic music is made inside a sequencer that has a grid which the beats are pretty much bound to so thered be little human drift in them.like i said i havent used ableton in a while but if its giving the bpm as 126.6579 maybe try add in your own bpm(round it off to 126)and then move the first marker to the first beat.
as far as i know ableton analyses the whole file before the first marker is placed so then when you move the first marker it still believes that the bpm of the track is 126.5698(or whatever)and so spaces the markers accordingly.i explained why i think it analyses them at 126.96857 in my first post.
just my theory but again its hardly a huge hinderence,most new tracks i could warp in about 5-10 seconds

Zascar

I was always tempted to give ableton a go, but seeing the hassle you have to go through warping tracks put me right off, I have hundreds of mp3s I'm not going to do each one manually. The gap at the start of tracks bugs me sometimes - I'd love a program that could go through all my mp3's and just delete any blank seconds at the start. Amazed that Ableton gets confused by this.

I wanted to start using Traktor Pro as it has some form of beatgrid so you essentially don't evne have to think about the beatmatching at all - which I think would be interesting as you would have more time to do other stuff, and I'd like to play about with 4 decks for the laugh.. However I was never able to get it working and just went back to Torq.

I don't really understand why people would dj with ableton considering it is not a specific dj solution - its seems to me to be more complicated than it needs to me - cause it is not specific for djing - its far more wide reaching than that. But it must be brilliant as a lot of the big boyz swear by it!

jtsuited

it really does annoy me how bad ableton is and just auto detecting and warping a track. now granted it only takes a second to warp the track but it's really annoying anyway.

One of my personal pet hates at the moment is when ableton for some unknown reason messes up the grid after a breakdown and despite fixing it (and hence altering the .asd file) decides to be nicely drifted by the end resulting in some fairly trainwreck mixes from time to time (only happened me once or twice playing live but still annoying all the same).

traktor's beatgrids are solid and once you learn how to adjust it if it's not right it's lovely to use.
if i was just 'djing' and not playing livesets I'd go with traktor.

vinylbomb

jtsuited wrote: »

it really does annoy me how bad ableton is and just auto detecting and warping a track. now granted it only takes a second to warp the track but it's really annoying anyway.

traktor's beatgrids are solid and once you learn how to adjust it if it's not right it's lovely to use.
if i was just 'djing' and not playing livesets I'd go with traktor.

In agreement on both counts. Ableton could be brilliant but is let down by its bogey warping, and its slightly inflexible way of working as a DJ mixer.

IMO the problem with warping tracks is because it maps to transients, not necessarily beats. So you can have stuff thats sits in another frequency spectrum altogether separate from the drums, which you can easily pick out aurally, but the algorithm simply sees a spike in the recording. If its any way in time and looped (or resembles looped, this is electronic stiff we're talking about so you may get modulation of the melody or whatnot but the underlying pattern is the same) then it will read it as part of the rhythm track. I can't say this for sure because I haven't seen the code or algorithm of the program (and if I did chances are it'd be like reading Greek, I might guess what 10% of it was about) but thats my best guesstimate as to why it occurs.