This is kind of an interesting problem and it made me wonder if anybody else has seen it.

I am working on a song right now that I will say up front is a particularly fragrant pile of crap. It is a spoof of the trance/industrial stuff that is often little more than an 8 bar loop played 20 times with nonsensical lyrics spoken over it. Just short of rap, but spoken word vocals (sprechstimme) just the same. It grew from a conversation where I said, referring to club dance music, that all you need is a beat and you could say anything over the beat and the kids would love it. And I went into an impromptu bit of doing nursery rhymes as lyrics. I think the first one was Mary Had A Little Lamb, with some vulgarity inserted to mimic rap music.

But I digress....

One of the tracks is a sample of a metal press stamping out parts. I have that on the downbeat all the way through so it had an industrial feel. When I put that in, I lined it up carefully using the "lock to beat" function, and every instance after, logic says, HAD to be correct because I pasted it in at 7-0-0 and then pasted that measure 60 times to the end of the song. It played well in RB. I saved the song as a SEQ, then as a WAV. When I played the WAV file back in an external player, slowly as the song progressed that sound moved off the downbeat by a tick or two, getting exponentially off the XX-0-0 where it was in RB. Has anybody else ever seen this?

I decided to do this project because I have never done anything like this. nor will I ever do it again. The song is THAT bad!!! Even if I tried to rework it and it came out 100 times better, 100 times zero is still zero.

I think of this as the musical equivalent of going to Lamaze classes. I did it once, but I wouldn't do it again.

Actually, I quite liked it.

See Eddie? See? What did I tell you?

Nobody cares if it sounds perfect to YOU, it only matters what a listener thinks. Just flood the internet dude, just flood it with all your creations and see what response you get.

As far as your question, yes I've had that happen, usually when I'm duplicating a two bar drum loop. I just chalked it up to the computer gods. It could be due to your sample rates not being the same, like your computer is rendering audio at 48 but RB is at 44 or something like that. I think it's called dithering and different programs are better than others.

All I did rather than busting my head over it, was listen to the track until I clearly heard it start to drift and backed up 4 bars and pasted it in again and kept doing that until the end of the song. Faster doing that than spend half the afternoon chasing down a bunch of hidden audio config's.

I'm finally retiring this summer and I will have the time to really get stuff like that right. Or, I'll drop it-again-and go have another beer...

Bob

I think you would enjoy iZotope Trash. You can add all kinds of weird scratchy stuff to sounds. HiFi, LowFi etc etc. Also there's a synth. I got them as part of the Bundle. Great for what you're doing now perhaps?

Not positive it’s related, but timing issues on playback affected me last summer. I recorded a RealTrack acoustic guitar from BIAB to use in the studio as a click track (and actually left it in the final piano trio project), The BIAB tempo was 140 bpm.

In the studio, the engineer had trouble lining up my track to each measure when I told him the tempo. Measures were ‘off’ at the end of the song. He then calculated the tempo (some utility he had) as being 139.8 something!

Why? I have no idea.

Just how exactly are you using this sample during playback?
Simple cut/paste of audio in RB (hardwrite), through a sample player, or ??

Importing the sound into an empty session, set at the correct tempo, moving the sample to the downbeat, pasting it across the whole song, saving it out, then opening the song and importing it to a new track. I pasted it to a bar at X-0-0 then copied that bar to every measure.

Is there a better way that would ave avoided all the tweaking?

Unless the dreaded 'Acidize' feature was in play on the imported sample it *should* have lined up. If you get one bar right and copy it as described I would expect it to work.

If you look at the Event List for that track, do you see any clues? This sometimes shows where/when the audio sample actually gets triggered.

Just kinda' thinking out loud. Eddie what if you tried using the audio as a loop.

Both Band-in-a-Box and RealBand lets you highlight part of an audio track then save the highlighted audio as a loop. Save the audio as a one or two bar loop. Then you can import the loop and let the program automatically adjust the loop to line up with the bars.

I suspect two things. First there maybe some discrepancy between the computer motherboard timing circuits. Second I suspect Band-in-a-Box and RealBand may increase the discrepancy by the way both programs approach counting time to split it into bars. In other words, everything has plus and minus tolerances so you may have a situation where one motherboard is close to the maximum side of allowable timing tolerance while the second motherboard is close to the minimum side of allowable timing tolerance. Then if the programs mess with timing then timing goes outside tolerance enough to be noticeable.

I still don't know what that Acidize thing is or does, and I wish I could just shut it off because it's annoying. I don't do acid.

What I did was select it, used the control and mouse and dragged it a hair so the dialog popped up, and pasted in at 1-0-0. Then I listened to it closely to see if there was any trailing artifacts I wanted to get rid of (there were none) and pasted it across the 68 measures. Even if you are 2 or 3 ticks off, when extrapolated over 68 measures, it turns into an audible delay. (Think about what a digital delay does with a 3 to 5 millisecond delay.) But it ended up okay after some careful pasting.