New to Gig Perfomer (just bought it this past weekend) and I love it, but pulling my hair out trying to get the streaming audio player to sync to the metronome.
We currently use Studio One’s show page to run our live shows and I would like to have it totally run by Gig Perfomer because of the lack of midi automation in Studio One’s show page. The problem is, I render out a single backing track, upload it into the streaming audio player and the bars never line up with the start of the audio so the it’s always off time with the metronome.
As you can see here the audio track starts at the second measure in Studio One to give us a 4 bar count in and the tempo of the song is set at 92 bpm:
When I import the exported audio file into Gig Perfomer it is correctly identifiying the tempo (I did notice it doesn’t always correctly identify and you can’t override what it detects) and the global tempo is set to 92 and the file is set to follow the global tempo, but as you can see the file in Gig Perfomer does not start at the second measure, it is off a few beats and there doesn’t seem to be a way to adjust the grid of the bars to line it up. This throws the timing off when with the metronome. We use a lot of arpeggiators and timing effects so being in sync is crucial.
The SAFP uses a static time-based grid, not an adjustable bar/beat grid that would change with the BPM or time signature. So you’re not seeing measure 2 there, you’re seeing time 00:02.000.
I’ve requested a bar/beat grid(as have others), and hopefully it will be an option in a future update.
Unfortunately, to me it’s more a problem than a solution. 99% of times it’s just wrong. So the only way I found to make it work is to add a bar of some sort of click/percussive sounds in the beginning. This way tempo detection focuses on that first bar and doesn’t get confused by more complex patterns in real music that follows.
The downside is that I need to mute that first bar though.
Thanks for the replies guys, I guess I had more faith in the streaming audio player since Gig Performer is so full featured elsewhere. @edm11 that makes sense, I guess I was so overwhelmed learning all the various aspects of GP that I missed that.
@vangrieg I’ll look into giving the midi track a track, but I’m starting to think having the streaming audio player involved at all is more of a hassle than it’s worth. I’ll probably stick to Studio One controlling the majority of the show and use GP where it may be useful.
Right now it’s main purpose is recording our rehearsals so at least it’s not wasted money spent.
So far this is a great community. Very responsive, just like their support. I’m going to continue to experiment with GP, but the current time crunch of getting this new project ready for our first show in April is forcing me to use the old Studio One Show Page standby.
S1’s show page is indeed lacking but I ran my last band with it so it’s very familiar to me and I can work fast. I’m pretty well versed in all things Studio One. That said, it is very lacking in midi features which is suprising since a song page is so unbelievably full of amazing features. Would be nice if Presonus and GP got together on integrating the two. Now that would be something!
Hmmm…maybe I need to have a chat with the guys at Presonus next time I’m going through Baton Rouge…haha
Not always. I didn’t investigate much but to me it seems like it gets confused easily when, for example, you have a count-in with two hihat beats on 4th followed by 4 beats on 8th notes. The resulting tempo I get is neither the one you could infer from the 4th nor from the 8th, but something in between. Actually, I don’t think I have a single backing track where tempo would be detected properly.
Yes that would be good indeed. Or even necessary. The way it is now isn’t useful at all for me.
Moreover, I don’t actually want any rhythmic content in the beginning of the songs a lot of times - I get what I need from a cue track, and just want complete silence at first, which may be followed by random sounds, synth pads or whatever.
Another issue is that we have a medley that goes from 90 for half the song and jumps to 100, if I remember correctly, GP detects the whole file as the higher bpm. 100
Overall, like I said, it’s more hassle than it’s worth.
It’s not super critical, I just don’t use the follow bpm feature as a result. Since I can change speed in the SAFP itself, I can live with that.
It would be great, however, to be able to slow down and accelerate automation, the cue track and such, and that does depend on global tempo. Since I only need this for practicing though, maybe it’s not critical.
That will always be the case, I think, I doubt that we should expect any overly complicated algorithms to detect that throughout the track. You can use tempo maps in GP for that, and that’s easy to get in Studio One, for example, it’s now very good at detecting tempo changes.
I don’t want it to detect the tempo, would rather automate it using markers, like I would in Studio One automating the tempo track. Another feature request.
Is there somewhere where they have a feature request form? Or is the community forum the feature request based on what they continually see posted?
Just use a MIDI track as a tempo map, it’s really the fastest and easiest way to do it. That ramp up can be done in 30 seconds in studio one or any other daw because they are built for editing things on a timeline.
I seriously doubt that SAFP will (or even should) evolve into anything like that, although that’s of course just my personal subjective opinion.
And programming actions is and always be much more awkward.
Generally I love S1, but that part is seriously lacking, imo.