Lining up drum clips for looping

How to use MultiTrack DAW
FlyingSinger
Posts: 3
Joined: August 28th, 10:39 am

Lining up drum clips for looping

Post by FlyingSinger »

I just discovered this app a few days ago, and it really is great. I've mostly used (old) SONAR 3 on an old desktop PC that died recently, so I'm down to my work laptop (no-go for recording) or my iPod Touch. I plan to get a new notebook PC for songwriting and recording in a couple of months, but in the meantime, I'm discovering that apps for writing and recording music on iOS have really blossomed since I last experimented with some a while ago (e.g., GigDaddy, Occarina, iShred). ThumbJam and Multitrack DAW are especially amazing. Congrats on a wonderful app.

I have a couple of questions.

1. I realize there is no native auto-looping but that repeated pasting is memory efficient. So I copy a percussion loop from TJ that loops perfectly there at 94 bpm (DjembeBeat_94bpm.wav) and paste into a couple of tracks in Multitrack (with tempo set to 94). No matter what I do (zooming, snap, sliding carefully while looping selected region, etc.), I cannot get the copies to line up so the beat repeats perfectly like a loop. Same thing whether the copies are on the same track (touching end to end) or adjacent tracks (so I can see the measure lines better). Is there a trick to this? I've tried with various samples.

2. Is there a way to pinch-zoom wave forms VERTICALLY (i.e., increase track height)? I've seen this in some screen shots but I can't do it myself.

Thanks,
Bruce
http://flyingsinger.blogspot.com
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pwnified
Posts: 1566
Joined: August 17th, 9:41 pm

Re: Lining up drum clips for looping

Post by pwnified »

The next version of MultiTrack will have 1/10th Tempo values and not just whole numbers. But whole number tempo clips should line up perfectly, if not, they must not be exactly 94bpm. Could you post a loop that wont line up?
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FlyingSinger
Posts: 3
Joined: August 28th, 10:39 am

Re: Lining up drum clips for looping

Post by FlyingSinger »

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure where/how to post a WAV clip, and it's something I downloaded from ThumbJam so not sure if it's OK to post. I will figure that out. Meantime, I've experimented with lining up dry and reverb (Ampkit? imported) vocal clips using very fine zooming to line up a distinct part of the waveform with the cursor. I suppose I can do the same thing with rhythm clips but I just thought that with Snap turned on, that if they were the proper length (as suggested by the fact that they loop perfectly in TJ) that they would just "snap into" the nearest measure line.

I did notice that on some other TJ clip, it was labeled 123 bpm but showed as 122.9 in TJ's display. So maybe the 94 bpm isn't exactly 94. But I have tried this with a bunch of clips from different sources including some that I made as tests with BeatStudio (I think - I'm trying out about 12 different new music apps so it's hard to keep straight). I've had the same trouble on all of them. It's probably something about the UI that I just have to get used to (it's a great app, but it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of SONAR, for obvious reasons).

Thanks again.