I just checked Audacity and I see that it is based on BPM. Pretty sure the click track is mainly designed for when a musician is recording but I suppose you can get reasonably close with it after tweaking it. There is usually some degree of drifting. That said, as Jim points out it's not the same thing. Apples and oranges. A beat track done by a human will always groove better/tighter.
It looks like a lot of work to do a label track for each beat. It doesn't take much time to do these beat tracks for me. The work as I see it will be doing songs I don't like...
Injury, keep scheming, it sounds like you're onto something.
I agree that the click track only works where the beat is not varying. In Wizards in Winter , TSO uses a click track in their performance. So in that case it laid down the beats down for the entire song, with no drifting.
Other songs, you need to mark the tracks manually.
Marking the music phrases is where i am spending my time this season. These need to be done by hand. I also am a musician. I play in the VFW band, the Highlands Ranch Community band, The Littleton community band, the John Phillip Sousa band, two oechestras at church, the renaissance faire and various solo gigs. I play flute, piccolo and recorders. As a musician and a programmer I am lookign at ways to get music data out where it can be used again.
Jim, i think you misunderstood the need for beats in Nutcracker. The label files will have music phrases and beats. The nutcracker effects will be made beat aware and allow things like having the effects on a megatree highlight the beat while you are doing bars or meteors.
It probably will be used more on the single strand effects of eaves, fire sticks, windows and arches.
Adding beat aware Nutcracker effects will be a next season task.
Marking a song into these three music classes was where i am going next year
Music phrases: The places where you would normally change an effect. Most are 5 to 10 seconds long
Beats: Every measure marked throughout the entire song. These will be used in nutcracker to do enhancements to the current effect
Notes: I plan on marking notes, note1 to note88 using the frequencies on a piano. These will be used in a nutcracker effect to place highlight effects matching a note. Like a bar effect where each bar lights up matching a descending note sequence.
By marking up a song into meta data , it has the advantage of only needing to be done once and can be shared across all the sequencers (well we could hope). The HLS sequencer has already added parsing of the Audacity label file for this seasons users.
I think all of this is more complicated than you just creating a beat track. Your method could be available to use this season and it is usable by the LSP users immediately. They also dont need Nutcracker in any way.
If you have time, i could use your help in marking up the music files i list in the xmas songs into music phrases. That would make those timing marks available for Nutcracker projects for this year. Marking up music phrases would best be done by someone who is comfortable with the music.
If interested in marking up music phrases, pm me.
thanks