I wasn't really 'needing' this anyway, as I was just trying to have a reference and it IS an acapella thing, but I was hopeful I might be able to reproduce it and then add some drums and have some hope of a grid. I even tried fiddling with the location of the audio track in the session, placing the claps right on the 2 and 4 and even at half-time (ish), it didn't align enough to be useful. The tempo was still 'about half' but still not close at all. None was really any better than the others.

I created a region for the thing in Melodyne and tried the different algorithms. I didn't really even realize that it was using Melodyne for this - I would have expected it was AudioSnap derived. Even when I've used a very simple and constantly played bass track I noticed that Melodyne sets the transients not at the same place for each note, it is very annoying! But it is an illusion that the program itself detects the notes automatically (it's Celemony's fairy tale). You must know I like Melodyne and I often use it, but I have learned that I have to revise about 60 to 70% of the detected transients in the note assignment mode.

This has to do with the very poor transient detection of Melodyne. There's not a single spot I can turn on the metronome and it is even vaguely in the same tempo - not a half-time, not a double-time.nothing. If I use this method, I get a tempo starting at 77.58 and varying somewhere around that for much of the song, topping out in one section at about 115bpm. If I just put a single temple on it at about 154.75, it works for some period of time and then falls off. I expected it would lock onto those obvious transients and come up with something that was at least in the ballpark.

The audio has claps all the way through it, so I was surprised that AudioSnap and this method completely failed the test. So I opened up that project and did this drag-to-the-timeline of the whole audio track of the audio I had imported. I was working on replicating a favorite vocal-only track and had the hardest time tempo matching it last weekend, not being able to figure out a way and I came across this post this evening.

Review cakewalk by bandlab