Straight BPM as a default option instead of Dynamic

Suggestions
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Im arguing that having a default mode is NOT helpful, mainly because i see that Dynamic BPM often is preferred.

Ahh I see, thank you for clarifying.

Not to be pedantic, but its not seeing it in the waveform’s thats making trouble, its hearing it in a mix.

You’re right, of course. I just wanted to exclude any obvious irregularities in the grid that you may have been experiencing that aren’t immediately visible on my freshly analyzed grid.

When you try to put Anchor Points here there is a slight inaccuracy in its placement. Either to early or to late. One nudge with the tool is to big. If it was possible to move the grid/anchorpoint less (higher resolution beat grid), finding the sweetspot for beat matching might be easier. It sounds like the generated grid can be placed places where the manual adjustments can not.
(snap function behaviour is too coarse? Im guessing there is a snap resolution involved)

The nudging is designed in a way, such that the beats you are currently seeing are moved by a constant factor, no matter their relative distance to the placed marker. This means that the further away you are from the marker, the tinier the effective nudge will be. So instead of nudging the marker and then going back and forth to the end and seeing if it’s tight, it’s easier to move away from the marker (where its accumulated “drift” will be larger) and nudging it from there. I’ve uploaded a screen recording of me demonstrating this here. Hope this helps you and others!

You are probably right, but I think most djs understand “underlying straight beat grid” as electronically produced, so there might be some confusion if you use this definition.

You are exactly right. This is why we’re trying to fully understand the issue using some representative examples, as the feature suggested here has the potential to break many tracks.

The “live drummer” example needs to be expanded to include hardware drum machines and other equipment. Just for greater understanding of concepts.

True. I believe the concrete issue with your tracks might be that they’re produced with sub-fractional BPM values (would definitely explain the tiny growing drift in “Aliens N Effect”), and/or some analog equipment in the case of “Arriving”.

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secret feature right here!!!
Sounds very helpful.

I will try to experiment with how it works

How does this relate to moving the whole grid
(not the anchor tool but the Grid tool)

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Hi,

Not sure if I had the same problem as some of the other users here but I had an issue with the bpm varying in this song also. Specifically it happened in the first breakdown when the bpm increased noticeably.

Otherwise, the beat gridding has pretty much been spot on and I am enjoying the app.

Donna Summer - I feel love MAW rework.

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@spiro, I looked at both tracks that you posted and there is only one really abnormality with arrival track at beat 126 where the signature of the track goes away and come back shortly after, the intro has nothing to do with the track itself because it also has no beat signature. But Arrival is just a straight 122 BPM and Aliens N Effect is a straight 140 BPM. The thing about the beat gridding in Djay Pro 5 is you as the DJ have to check what BPM is the right one for each track that gets analyzed by Djay Pro 5 weather is to be straight or dynamic and switch to the appropriate signature for the track.

@PRO24DJS, the same applies because your track is just a straight 95 you have to pick the appropriate time signature for the track.

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You seem to chime in on something completely new . . .
no worries, but the tempo was not the trouble here, it was about how the Dynamic BPM can have weird effects. For the specific tracks, it was a wobbly intro (turned out to be a bad example. didnt wobble) and a “shuffle” of the beat that tricked the Dynamic BPM calculation.
All just humble examples of places where I had noticed the initial beat grid did not work perfectly.

Please chime in with problem tracks for analysing. So the auto beat grid can become better

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OK no problem. But if you can’t tell the software where the time signature starts aka first beat. If you set the first beat at the first swooshing sound, then you would realize that the intro has no time signature it just random sounds. Junk. If you can find a DJ program that can beat grid this track example at the end, then you would realize that there is no DJ program in active development that is even close to DJ Pro 5.
Christopher Martin - Never cheat
Try to beat grid this track in any other DJ program, other than Deckadance DJ which had this type of beat gridding since 2013 but was discontinued. Dj Pro just made it better.

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The good side of digital is that the tools allow for using even this type of intros in a mix! No stickers on the vinyl required!

With a bit of adjustments and some counting, even this seemingly random intro can be used with great effect. And as you say, DjayPro has the tools to make it work. But there is always space for improvement, and these guys seems to want to make things work even better! Im all for that!

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Exactly my point… i have 20k songs… I need them straight unless stated otherwise… And my collection iss 99.5% straight…

I can understand that it might be the opposite with other genre where most tracks are dynamic… So to go around this we need to have the option to choose according to your collection… Im not trying to say which is better…:grin:… I just want that option! I have had alot of suprises lately… Beats syncing to as slow as 35bpm…

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@Grid_Support

found some more oddly behaving tunes.

Analyze sets it to Dynamic BPM. intro goes down in pitch for one bar two times (1st bar and 10th bar), but if you set it to Straight BPM, it sounds slightly off when beat matching it.

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bar 25 pitch goes down 4% for 1 bar’isH

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bar 43 down 10%ish for 1 bar (ignore the first 41 bars for this example)

All examples of Dynamic BPM where the beat grid suddenly goes down and back up in the break/intro part, but sounds tighter for beat matching the main part of the tune.

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Thanks for touching base here. It’s super appreciated.
The tracks were straight (no live drummer). Of course as I was in a mix, I did not have the possibility to document what songs created this situation but will take a pic or screenshot the next time it happens, right after, just to see if I can recreate it at home (to verify) and send it to you (private message?).
Thanks! :pray:

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Also, (completely unrelated), I’m having issues with album artwork not appearing (about 25% of my collection). Will open another post for this.

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Hi @djantona, there’s an existing topic for missing album artwork on macOS.

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Just catching up on this thread after seeing it highlighted in last week’s summary email. My collection (smaller than yours at around 1k tracks) is a mix of live-drummer and straight tempo, mostly house. Every track I check that has straight tempo is showing up as Straight in the BPM popup. (This is on v5.1.7 on iPad.)

All the 80s boogie cuts etc are correctly showing as Dynamic, with the tempo range shown.

In either case I can flip between Dynamic/Straight and the Revert button highlights if I change the setting to be different than what the app decided when it analysed the track.

Sounds like you’re seeing very different behaviour with Dynamic being chosen for straight-tempo tracks, true?

Also, @Slak_Jaw and @Grid_Support the discussion and comments above imply that the grid is baked into the track analysis by whatever version of the app was current at the time the track got added and analysed. This is a bit surprising/scary. It’s really hard to spot afterwards which tracks I might have done manual grid edits on. It would be nice to be able to re-analyse all tracks in the collection EXCEPT those, to get the new better analysis, or simply have that happen automatically on reload if the tracks have not had grid edits.

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Hi @mikeb187,

happy to hear that the automatic detection seems to be working as intended for you :slight_smile:

Bigger improvements in the beat detection can trigger a new analysis, but so far this hasn’t happened since the initial release of Fluid Beatgrid in 5.0. The current behavior of Playlist > Analyze Tracks is that only tracks that have not been previously analyzed are reanalyzed (with the current version of the beat detection), while right clicking a track > analyze always forces a reanalysis of that particular track.

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll forward this suggestion to the dev team :slight_smile:
Ultimately it’s a trade-off between always having the latest analysis and not bothering users by forcing reanalyses at every little change, especially for tracks that had previously been correctly analyzed (as implied by the lack of edits). But feel free to share your arguments/use cases here or by opening a new suggestion thread for the desired analysis behavior.

Let me know if I can assist with anything else.

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Hi @Grid_Support ,

Thanks for those useful details, this is stuff I will definitely keep in mind then. Can I just check I understand correctly? On iOS there’s no right-click obvs, so if I use the dropdown at the top of the track list with nothing selected (in either a playlist or all of Music) then that analyses new tracks only, but if I use checkbox selection for one or more tracks and then “Analyze Songs” from the dropdown after that, it forces it for the selected tracks?

On my previous suggestion, thinking more about it the idea of auto-analysing tracks on upgrade is actually not a good one, it risks grids changing for existing tracks. I know generally we hope the analysis will get better as versions progress, but if it regresses and you only find out about it at a gig, playing a track that previously was correctly gridded, well nobody wants that.

How about adding filter options to show tracks with manual edits, and perhaps those with unmodified AI grids that would be updated by the current version? Guess that second option might be technically challenging, but the first one would seem really easy and well worthwhile.

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Apologies for the delayed response.

Yes, that’s exactly right.

Yeah, those are considerations that we have to keep in mind.

I’ll forward these suggestions over to the dev team, thanks! :slight_smile:

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Thanks @Grid_Support appreciate the confirmation on that first thing and i’ll be interested to see if my suggestion makes it through to the app down the line :pray:

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