Here's another video tutorial how to use the ACW. Although Mr. Henry's tutorial is more than 35 minutes and specific to extrapolate the chords from an audio file of a popular song, the first 16 minutes clearly demonstrate how to the get -L-'s exactly right on the WAV form.
This video was posted 3 years ago and has more than 37,000 views with 178 positive comments. Read the video's comments please. I didn't see a single request to re-code the ACW, eliminate the integration of the tempo map to the Chord Sheet or to refine the ACW. It earned a B- grade from Mr. Henry.
Charlie, thanks i will watch it and see what i get. I am not suggesting a full recode, but there is some shaky results from time ti time. 37,000 watches and 178 positive comments is less than a half percent. I have been using the ACW for many years i have gotten a few positive results but more often than not it is frustrating. I have used it in BiaB and RB. There are others here who have experienced the same thing. i have used tempo mapping in at least three different DAWs as well. You and anyone else can post all the positive from others you can find. I am willing to learn more. What i am telling PGM is that it has some peculiar behavior at times. I am not the only one who has noticed that moving Bar lines in ACW works but often it battles you as it constantly causes other lines to move off their position. I did a project in Mixbuss and used their tempo mapping. It was simple and didn't have as many cool tools as BiaB but it did work and seemed to be learning as it went. In the end the results were pretty good. I am trying to get PGM to take a look at improving the tool one more time. I can't understand why there is so much resistance to improvement.
HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96
Charlie i went and listened to Henry's video and I get what he was trying to do, but in reality, his bar lines were dreadfully off in the video. I know he was trying to get a basic overview but to say the tempo was right on and explain that the intro was different than the rest of the song when the difference was that he never synced the bars to the proper tempo. The last time he played the song before moving on to the chord analysis he kept saying Boom for each bar and in the video, you could plainly see that the lines were nowhere near the downbeat of the track. I would imagine that if he did try to line it up the video would have taken hours! Why because the lining up process would fight you till you were exhausted.
What happens is that when you start lining them up after doing the auto marking it seems to be going well but as you progress down the song it begins to get harder and one move messes up another. soon you have a varied tempo. So, you use the equalize tempo button and now they are all off again or at least some of them, so you fight with it and fight with it and at some point, after about two or three hours you throw your hands up and quit!
Bottom line is it works sort of, but it could use a bit of attention. The ACW is an incredible tool, but like a lot of tools in BiaB it is not fully polished.
Last edited by Rob Helms; 07/18/2405:19 AM.
HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96
Good morning Rob. I hate the tutorial wasn't much of a benefit to you. I didn't get your point about the views and positive comments percentage value. The intent of mentioning those numbers was with as much positive feedback that others got from the video, there might be some value in the video for you. I agree the ACW is an incredible and valuable tool and wish you the best getting your struggles worked out.
Barlow thanks for the video it did help to a degree. I learned two things. 1. You can get the job done, and 2. It still needs some refinement. From many other’s comments it is clear this is not just my struggle. The tools are there but they can be very frustrating.
In Henry’s video it is so crystal clear that his bar line after about the first half dozen are no where near the down beat. He keeps saying “boom” for every bar but they are not a boom they are way off. Yes he can walk thru the hours of time and effort needed to make them all line up. But he admits that is too much for a short video. I have texted this tool quite extensively for three days now after having used it in the past and yes I got fairly decent results after three painful hours. It shouldn’t be that hard! As you line stuff up things you already did go out of alignment. Back and forth until you almost give up and decide that it is as good as it will get.
Here is what I found out after a lot of hard work. If you want to use it to map a popular song the you can get it fairly close but at some point you are going to dump the wave file and run with the created .sgu to get a song bed for that song so yes that is possible. If you want to add a wave file to so g your i for a wrestle of a life time. I also watched the video PGM put out of the Shenandoah song they got reasonable results but it is in reality harder than that video makes it out to be. I watched a video of doing the same thing In Harrison Mixbus they have a simple process with very targeted tools. Simple but effective.
The reference to the positive reviews was to point out that 178 positive reviews from 37,000 views is a very small sample set of people’s opinions.
Again thanks for your time.
HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96
In Henry’s video it is so crystal clear that his bar line after about the first half dozen are no where near the down beat. He keeps saying “boom” for every bar but they are not a boom they are way off.
You're most probably correct, but it's worth remembering with videos like these that the process of making the video can cause some apparent skewing and other effects.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful. AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11 BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software. Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts .
In Henry’s video it is so crystal clear that his bar line after about the first half dozen are no where near the down beat. He keeps saying “boom” for every bar but they are not a boom they are way off.
You're most probably correct, but it's worth remembering with videos like these that the process of making the video can cause some apparent skewing and other effects.
I dont think that's the problem in this case, I think Rob is speaking about this
Audio and video are synced, but bars on the ACW are clearly not correctly positioned on the down beat.
Audio Edit/ACW is a very good tool however there are some quirks.
OP:s comment on things moving around among already edited bars is likely to be a lack of understanding of the relation between User and Auto generated bar lines.
Working with alignment of non consistent tempo is a fairly quick operation. Start out like Henry C does with some bar lines and have it autogenerate the remainder of the song. What Henry doesn't do is to adjust when it gradually goes out of sync. So it just question of checking e.g. every 8 bars and move to the appropriate position and the bar lines to left will adjust accordingly. Continue and the song should be ok in a couple of minutes if it's a fairly consistent recording. Will take a bit more time if it's very sloppy time wise.
OP:s comment on things moving around among already edited bars is likely to be a lack of understanding of the relation between User and Auto generated bar lines.
I'm pretty sure everybody here knows the difference between user and automatically added bars in ACW, that's definitely not the problem.
I did it just like Henry did I always add the first 6 bars or so then ad auto marking. Then begin to try to align the rest of the bars.
Look I admit that the ACW has some good results. However it still can be rather shaky. I’m not new to this process I have used ACW since inception. Beta tested it through the last few upgrades. It is both better and not better. Even the chord detection depends upon the value of the wave file. The more complicated the less effective it is. I tried a live Wave file this morning from a friend and it struggled to detect the chords. The problem was the bad quality of the wave.
The bar detection works and gets you close but it does not just line up like some say. As cerio’s link and Henry’s video clearly shows. Henry admitted that it can be hours of work.
Henry was showing how to create a BiaB file for a popular song. The best method for this is line up a few bars, auto mark it get it close as possible and then move on to the chords detection and then dump the wave file and work with what you have. For that it is fine.
Next I go to a good simple internet chord file for the song and fix the over complicated chords that were detected. Oh but Rob, it does a great job detecting chords you say. Yes but it sometimes adds to those chords from the tangle of instruments in the song.
End results are still super useful.
Last edited by Rob Helms; 07/21/2407:26 PM.
HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96
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