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Quantize audio timing to nearest beat ?

Is there any way within Qtractor to quantize audio timing to nearest beat? I see lots of options for MIDI, but nothing for analog. ???

---scott

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rncbc's picture

nope.

although theoretically possible through (patented) DSP algorithms, it's not worth the effort in the general sense: in music production is by far more practical and flexible to do it on the MIDI than on audio PCM realm, which tend to result in dubious and not so accurate results psycho-acoustically, let alone musically... of course there are good methods and algorithms out there that might work good enough on some genres and quite often and mostly only on strong percussive sample sequences but beyond that very special cases it's all snake oil: you end with some special fx results and not quite just quantization as you probably intended.

trust me, as a musician, do it well and do it on MIDI ;)

cheers

scott.thomason's picture

I trust you, but I don't know how to do what you're suggesting. Let's say I have recorded a guitar, and a small snippet of the clip looks like the attached screenshot. What is it that I would do to take advantage of MIDI in this case?

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rncbc's picture

you don't, you either work in audio PCM _or_ in MIDI from the set going...
however
a. you may try convert audio into MIDI (not in qtractor) to a varying degree of accuracy (mostly depends on the software tool _and_ the type of musical performance you're after, whether monophonic, melodic or harmonic, etc.);
b. you may try to split the audio clip into several, carefully cut-sliced on the onsets, move the clips around as far as to "manually quantize" as your liking on the timeline; then merge the moved clip parts back into one single audio clip; of course you'll have to be extremely careful to making the cuts preferably only on silent moments... unless you're targeting the "glitch" genre of production ;)

byee

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