It may be my own lack of hands on experience but I find the chord Analyser tool suffers from general bouts of inaccuracy.
My expectancy was that it would rip chords from MP3's as cleanly as MP3's can be ripped from CD's. However it seems to get thrown into confusion about what its analsying and can come up with some not so accurate chords to the extent that the tune is almost unrecognizable. Again I stress that I am new to this particular tool. Is there a way of increasing this accuracy to at least 90% , Maybe a specific file type, or recording mode or settings adjustment. Has anyone else found this tool disapointingly inaccurate or a fantastic feature to use? If so pray tell us how.

The simpler the song chord wise the better.

First of all, you only gave us two choices (although polls usually don't play that well here, in general). So it's either wonderful or it's really bad.

Usually, depending on the type of music, it's somewhere in between. And it's generally pretty good at least picking up the bass note of the chord. But it's not a silver bullet. You still have to apply a little bit of music theory to fix it up afterwards.

To me, that fact that it works at all is pretty amazing. I don't think comparing this to ripping MP3's from CD's is fair. When it gets down to it, that's pretty much just an exercise in math. I would compare it having software that analyzes a photograph or a painting and then tells you "what it sees". That's what the chord analyzer is trying to do for music. Software could probably pick out faces and bodies in a posed photograph, but what about a painting by Jackson Pollock or Picasso?

You also didn't say what kind of music you were trying to get the chords for.

Does the chord analyzer still have a ways to go? Sure it does; it hasn't even been available that long. But I think it's a pretty good start and I've gotten some pretty good results for rock and pop songs.

You also have to make sure you play by the rules...you must absolutely set Bar #1; you must have each bar defined on the beat (press F8 while you listen, if necessary). Some people have better luck by doubling the tempo and viewing each two beats as a single bar (which won't look very good in the chord grid), but will give you a higher granularity of chords.

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It may be my own lack of hands on experience but I find the chord Analyser tool suffers from general bouts of inaccuracy.

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In my experience it is usually due to a little of each. Of importance also is the quality, amplitude levels and other such things about the soundfile in use, as well as chord complexity issues. The ACW seems to work best at finding chords for songs that don't use a lot of chord extensions, for example. Another issue is the instrumentation in the file, how many of them as well as what each may be playing. ACW can help a lot, but it is not able to be absolute accurate.

One thing I use the ACW for, a lot, is to get the simple layout of a song entered into BIAB. The ACW is a real timesaver along those lines, no more bar counting to find the chorus length, etc. instead I use the ACW and tap tempo to get the bars mapped and export to the BIAB chord grid, where I usually have to correct at least some of the chord entries. Again, this latter job is often dependant upon the song recording itself.


--Mac