GregRockNI have utilized Tracker in SD3 to extract drum hits from recordings of the various instruments in the kit. The waveform recordings have about a 200 msec offset in time from the start of the waveform to the transient from the kick drum that starts on beat 1 of measure 1 (e.g. there is 200 msec of silence in the wave files before the first kick drum hit that is beat 1 of measure 1 of the song). Within Tracker I have turned on the “Snap to Transients” button and then dragged the Tracker’s first measure marker to coincide with the transient of the kick drum of the first beat of measure two of the audio file. NOTE it appears that the very first measure marker in tracker is design by-default to correspond with beat 1 of measure 2; it does NOT seem to correspond to beat 1 of measure 1. I then drag the second measure marker to transient of beat 1 of measure 3 of the audio recording. Visually on screen in the Tracker this aligns the start of the measures exactly with the start of the transients. Visually everything looks great on the Tracker screen except that the very first transient on beat 1 of measure 1 of the audio file is still offset by 200 msec relative to beat 1 of measure 1 in the Tracker timeline.
I then click the “Update Tempo Map” button and then click the “Export” button. I then click and drag the “All Tracks Combined” track and drag it to a new empty track in the SD3 timeline. After doing this I open the SD3 grid editor to look at the instrument hits on the timeline. I find that all of the hits are offset in time by 200 msec relative to measures. In other words, the timing of all the hits is offset by the amount of silence at the beginning of the original audio files that I imported into Tracker. I have tried several things in Tracker to get rid of this 200 msec timing offset but no matter what I do the net result is the same… there is a 200 msec offset in the Tracker-generated hits (MIDI) relative to the session measures.
That causes me to ask the following question: Is it required to remove all silence at the beginning of the audio files before importing them into tracker? In other words, does the first audio sample of the audio files need to correspond to the first transient of the first drum hit in the audio files (i.e. remove silence)?
Alternative question: is there some feature in Tracker that would allow me to tell it to ignore the silence at the beginning of the audio files?
Bear-Faced CowThe tracker doesn’t contain any editing capabilities for sound. It is meant to interpret your song as is. Any spaces at the beginning will be perceived as empty bars.
if you want your drums to line up at the beginning, you are best to trim the audio file with either an audio editor or DAW prior to importing it into the tracker. If you are using multiple drum tracks, then the latter would be preferable as you can slice them all in the same spot.
jord
GregRockNThanks Jord. You have confirmed the conclusion that I reached that I need to trim off the silence at the start of the audio clips in order to avoid the time offset in the Tracker-generated MIDI. I received the audio files from somebody else that had generated them in a different DAW and different session, and imported I them into Tracker as-is/as-received. I can quickly import them into Pro Tools to trim off the silence and then export them before importing them into Tracker. Alternatively (and even easier) I simply dragged the “All Tracks Combined” track from Tracker into the SD3 timeline, selected all notes, turned off the snap-to-grid, and then slid all the notes left by 200 msec to get them properly aligned with the measures so that they play properly on the beat in my DAW session.
I had mistakenly thought that by using the “Find Tempo” feature of Tracker and getting the drum hits to line up with the measure markers in Tracker that Tracker would then export the MIDI properly aligned to the measures as seen in Tracker. However that exported MIDI (or simply dragging the “All Tracks Combined” track to the SD3 song timeline”) is not properly measure-aligned due to that silence at the beginning of the original audio drum tracks. This still confuses me a bit, and it would be nice if Tracker would export things the way they are visually seen in the Tracker timeline (i.e. if the drum hit is perfectly aligned on beat 1 of measure 2 after using “Find Tempo”, for example, then when exported from Tracker that drum hit would occur on beat 1 of measure 2 rather than beat 1 + (amount of silence at the beginning of the audio file) measure 2.
It would therefore be a nice feature for SD3 to add the ability to tell Tracker to ignore some user-defined amount of silence or some amount of time that the user does NOT want Tracker to analyze at the start of the audio files. This, I think, would be fairly simple to program for the SD3 developers and would be a major convenience for the end-user in cases like mine where I received audio files with undesired silence at the start of the waveforms. I know how to work around the issue, but it would be a lot nicer if I could deal with it with a simple “Ignore XXX msec of time at the start of the audio” feature in Tracker.
Thanks again for the reply.
Mark KingOne of the reasons I enable midi out in sd3 and record in real time tracker midi to a midi track in my DAW. Also saves configuring tempo maps which when it’s free time audio is not really feasible.
SD3 with older sdx,s plus Rooms of Hansa and Death & Darkness. Cubase and wavelab current versions. Roland TD50x using all trigger inputs for triggering SD3 only. Windows 11 computer. Various keyboards and outboard gear as well as VST instruments. Acoustic drums: Yamaha 9000 natural wood and Pearl masters. Various snare drums. RME BabyFace Pro FS and Adam A7X monitors
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