Beat track sharing

[sebjsan]

Sean has a list of songs that people use      He posted a thread somewhere.

[lonewolf41]

The song length may not be identical, but the track may still be able to be used.  For instance, if I rip a track from a CD, it might be one length, but the same track downloaded from Amazon might be slightly different.  If they add blank space to the front or end of the track, that doesn't change the actual beat, just when it starts in the MP3.

I have a sequence like that.  I have the music from a CD, but it is slightly different from the sequence I downloaded and does not line up well at all as downloaded.  If I add or delete cells to/from the beginning of the sequence, it shifts the beat track to line up with my version of the song.  So as long as the songs are the same versions, they should be able to be lined up and shared.  it might just take shifting the track to match your specific music file.

Also, nutcracker uses "chunks" of the music.  So a section could start @ 10.4 seconds and end @ 24.6 seconds.  So a nutcracker effect would play during that time, but there are many beats during that 14.2 seconds that are not accounted for...especially if you are using other DMX items that activate to the beat or melody of the song.  You might get an effect to be close to the beat, but there will be no substituting for manually lining up your lights with a good beat track in areas where you need that kind of precision.  Each type of sequencing has their place and are used extensively in each of my songs.

My $0.02,
-Keith

[deplanche]

I agree that the same should be indicated because ripping CDs is always different than you get online.  That way it would make it easier to see if you have the same one or not.

Also, some songs need more than 1 channel for a beat track, depending on their complexity.  Hitting the words to a song can be very different than the drum beat.  So if you can add a description as to what you are considereing the beat, that would be helpful too.  Especially if you are using more than 1 channel.

[shaunkad]

I have 5 versions of white christmas all different lenghts same artist

[Mike Hill]

How do we go about getting this setup within the forum?  Is that even an option?

[shaunkad]

Maybe we could use the wiki or have a new forum page

[zwiller]

Let's just see where it takes us.  We can just post the files here.  This is just something I thought about. 

The elapsed time will not be 100% but it will eliminate most songs that are well edited.  A second or two off might be reasonable.  Folks with LSP are OK since there is an alignment tool.  It works great.  I assume there is a way to tweak the other programs too.  But Keith has it right, the beat "should" be
the same. 

For now I plan to use just 2 channels for a beat track.  It doesn't have all the fancy riffs and stuff in there but it is a good solid foundation to build on. 

[chrisatpsu]

might be nice to have a forum section called Community, a new thread could either be artist, or song, with the different version beat tracks inside, so it's easier to find what you're looking for rather than 27 pages in a thread.

[zwiller]

I leave that up to the mods.   I am still unsure if there is enough interest.  Regardless, I plan to do some for the folks here that want it.  I hope somebody will do the .msq to .vix conversion.  If there is somebody willing I can send them one to try.  I wonder how well it will translate.  I am in no way affiliated but the level of accuracy in LSP for beat placement is powerful and not sure if that will carry forward to vixen.

[twooly]

I can do the conversions to help out.

[jnealand]

I opened up the LSP file that Zwiller sent me and loaded it into LSP 2.5  Looked and sounded good.  My copy of the song seemed to match up to Zwillers beats.  I exported the sequence to LOR format.  Then I tried to use xlights to convert to Vixen, but it failed.  Here are the xlights messages:
Reading: C:\Users\jnealand\Documents\xlights data\FelizNavidadBEAT.lms
Reading LOR sequence
Track 1 length = 0 centiseconds
ERROR: sequence length is 0
Finished converting all files

Not being a heavy xlights converter I am not sure what could be wrong.  Will try using light elf once I can get it to run.  No luck so far, but I posted my error messages in the light elf forum.

[smeighan]

Sean has a list of songs that people use      He posted a thread somewhere.

Christmas song list (For Nutcracker users) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login
for anyone, no login needed: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

the difference is nutcracker users have sort options.

I have a file with music phrases and beat tracks for Wizards in Winter.

I created the beat tracks using audacity.

Use "Generate, Click Track"



The concept of marking music phrases and beat marks using audacity is that the file is sequencer agnostic.

The marks are a 3 column ascii table (START time, END time, label name). Time is in microseconds.
I hope we can get more sequencers next year to recognize this simple way of marking songs.

thanks

[zwiller]

Sean,
I really want to learn Nutcracker but it's not in the cards right now.  Do you have other beat tracks?  I hope I am not taking anything away from what you're doing. 

Here's the deal: I have been playing music most of my life so the beat thing is an organic thing to me.  I don't rely on software.  I lay it down manually. 

What I am trying to do is help build a library of beat tracks so that that members who can't dance    can have a good starting point.  That's all.

Jim, thanks for reporting back.  I have an updated beat track for an amazon mp3.  Glad the appliance install went well.    Another member successfully converted to .vix.  Sounds promising. 

[injury]

Public songs up on nutcracker now looks to be Wizards of Winter, Christmas Eve Sarajevo, Mad Russian Chritsmas.

Seems a shame that both goals are so similar yet looks like there's gonna be a lot of redundant work done in different places. I wonder if there was a way to grab the data from the lsp files strip out everything but the on/off and save it in the txt column format nutcracker expects. I'm currectly scheming in my brain on trying something similar with the midi files I create for my use as beat tracks.

You don't need to know nutcracker to submit beat tracks it's more knowing how to make a label track in Audacity, uploading it into nutcracker website with a link to buy the song and a name and then done. People can pick effects they have made that I believe are auto sized to those beat phrases for their chosen light model and hit the magic export button to get a HLS, LSP, LOR, or Vixen file of their choosing.

Now for someone who didn't want any of the nutcracker effects I could see there being a desire for something fast like a "just light on and off" button in nutcracker along with the phrases I suppose.

[jnealand]

While the concepts are similar I do not feel that a traditional beat track is quite the same as timing marks created by audacity.  I see the audacity "phrases", as Sean calls them, being just a time slot (usually a number of seconds) that may contain many beats and that is the difference.  A phrase in Nutcracker is just a point in time to change an RGB effect.  A beat can be a light(s) flashing every second and you would not change a spiral tree every second.  I think it is a mistake to confuse or comingle the two, but it is important to know the difference and both have their place.