Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

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Digital Larry
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Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by Digital Larry »

I need to trim loops that I create sometimes. The typical scenario is that I am running my looper and recording and it just takes me awhile to settle in after hitting "record" to play the part correctly. So I wind up with a loop that has N measures of silence or me fumbling around and then several measures of the part being played more or less correctly. Then I either make a mistake or decide it's gone on long enough.

So, ideally, I'd pull this into an editor that was aware of both the tempo and time signature so I could easily snap to these boundaries to trim on measure boundaries. Snap to zero crossing and/or auto fade at the edges would be great too. Ability to audition the sample while it loops would be nice, and if it could sync to JACK transport, even better.

Audacity (which I have used for years as a basic editor) doesn't have a concept of tempo or time signature except to create a click track, which doesn't help all that much. Also, its relationship with JACK is not good.

I don't care about multi track. I don't care about effects plugins or tone generation or any of that. I just want to trim and audition loops in the simplest way possible.

I'm not sure if WAV file metadata includes the ability to save tempo/time sig information, I will have to check.
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Re: Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by tavasti »

Now first question is, does it matter if program has extra features? You could be using any DAW, for example ardour. Sure it does have features you don't need, but is that a problem?

If you anyway need concept of tempo and need jack sync, it is reaching something like DAW.

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Re: Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by rghvdberg »

couple of options here

1) Sonic Visualiser https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/
in tandem with this vamp plugin https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projec ... ins/files/
This plugin let's you analyze audio files and will find temp, beats, bars etc
Then it's simply a matter of selecting a loop and saving the loop as .wav

2) Audacity
Full featured editor that has beat detection ootb, but can also load vamp plugins (like the qm-vamp above).

3) Different approach : Ninjas2 audio slicer plugin
Plugin that works in a DAW
- load sample
- set number of slices
- each slice is assigned to a midi note
check the readme
https://github.com/rghvdberg/ninjas2/
binaries -> https://github.com/rghvdberg/ninjas2/re ... /automatic

/Rob
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Digital Larry
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Re: Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by Digital Larry »

Thanks for the suggestions.
rghvdberg wrote:couple of options here
1) Sonic Visualiser https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

2) Audacity
Full featured editor that has beat detection ootb, but can also load vamp plugins (like the qm-vamp above).

3) Different approach : Ninjas2 audio slicer plugin

/Rob
Sonic Visualizer looks cool for other reasons. I'm not expecting the tool to detect beats though. In fact it would probably be bad if it did because it would require me to play on the beat.

Audacity's "beat detection" isn't really what I'm after. Just want something that can mark out the measures according to what I tell it (if I have to) about the tempo and time signature. Then easily snap and trim on those boundaries.

Ninjas 2 looks very close and seems to use the same graphical widget toolkit as the "non" apps and luppp.
tavasti wrote:Now first question is, does it matter if program has extra features? You could be using any DAW, for example ardour. Sure it does have features you don't need, but is that a problem?

If you anyway need concept of tempo and need jack sync, it is reaching something like DAW.
Regarding "does it matter if it has extra features"? Well, not directly. It's mostly a matter of how efficiently it can do what I described and if there's some possibility that it can be linked to a MIDI footswitch. If there's an open source DAW that does this then I am interested, because maybe I could pull that function out of it to either be standalone or integrated into my Franken-Looper concept (bits and pieces of various programs crudely stitched together).

Yesterday I sat down with my SooperLooper/Hydrogen looping setup and started getting some ideas down. Previous ideas had been in 4/4 and were easier to capture. However the lick I wanted to loop yesterday is in 5/4 and has a couple pickup notes preceding the downbeat and that was hard for me to press the buttons and play without blowing it. But if I let the loop recorder just run, then eventually I got to where I had 4 bars down and I just want a FAST way to trim the bad parts off.

I am focusing totally on workflow to optimize the way I work. I have used SONAR for many many years and its approach to doing this is totally inefficient and unacceptable to me. I only have so many years left (as do we all) and I consider mouse clicking and file format conversion and any extra steps at all the creative equivalent of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic. We accept it because we think there's no alternative. I don't accept it and I'm looking for alternatives. I have a vague goal as a fairly long term project to try to bring some of the features together by combining various parts of different open source programs.

Even SooperLooper, which works very well for my needs, does not remember the folder where you last saved a session. So you have to go look for it each time you start. This sort of thing is just ridiculous to me. I tried non session manager for awhile, and it seemed to be wedged somehow last time I ran it. Will have to uninstall and reinstall. Of course, now that I can compile SL myself I could also simply add that feature which would eliminate the need to try integrating a separate app to keep track of it.

I've talked about this semi obsessively here and on another forum I frequent, and I get the impression that I am way more bothered by workflow inefficiency than most people. I won't say I've tried everything, but everything I've tried, which to date includes:
a) SONAR/Windoze
b) Garageband/Mac
c) Ardour

don't handle recording live loops under MIDI footswitch control very well. Ableton Live might, and once I burn out on what I'm doing I'll try that (I already own it but haven't adapted myself to its way of doing things). I'm also sick of adapting myself to the way certain programs do things! Maybe this is how people who are left handed feel about a lot of things: "this doesn't work for me".

Hydrogen actually has an integrated sample trimmer which might work in this regard. At first glance it's just for trimming one shot samples as compared to loops.

Onward and... onward!
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Re: Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by rghvdberg »

this is a tutorial for Harrison Mixbus but it works exactly the same in Ardour 5.12

Tempo Mapping in Mixbus
https://youtu.be/rrr9lr_Pbkg
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Digital Larry
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Re: Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by Digital Larry »

rghvdberg wrote:this is a tutorial for Harrison Mixbus but it works exactly the same in Ardour 5.12

Tempo Mapping in Mixbus
https://youtu.be/rrr9lr_Pbkg
Thanks a lot, that is slightly different but I would like to try that too. There is some corresponding thing in SONAR and I know it's just me but I could never figure out how to use it. In fact that may be why I decided to try to love the metronome. There are some things where using a metronome and a steady tempo doesn't necessarily suck the life out of everything. And I've done some things where a steady tempo would in fact completely ruin the feeling.
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Re: Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by AlexTheBassist »

Digital Larry wrote:In fact it would probably be bad if it did because it would require me to play on the beat.
I gonna write it down, print it, and hang in a frame on one of our studio's walls. It will be next to this statement: “Learning music theory? Nah, it narrows down my creative view”.
Being creative does not imply being lazy, stupid, or illiterate.

Working in Harrison Mixbus and Ardour on KDE Neon + KXStudio.
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Re: Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by jeroen »

Simple possible workflow in Audacity:

1. Create clicktrack with chosen tempo.
2. Apply beat finder.
3. If required, shift the beat track to align with the start of the click samples.

Now you can select all other tracks using snapping based on the beat track.
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Digital Larry
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Re: Looking for stripped down WAV editor, needs measure/beats and looping, JACK

Post by Digital Larry »

Thanks, that sounds a little complicated, but it could work. I'm getting a bunch of things going on a Raspberry Pi with a little 7" LCD display but it's actually fairly promising. As I've built sooperlooper and all the "non" apps from source I am less scared to dive into these things. It can be my long term project. If I don't have a technical project going on my life feels empty and dull. :cry: So the idea might be to add an "edit" button to a track on SooperLooper which would launch or open Audacity with that track's WAV file in it. SooperLooper itself has a concept of tempo, depending on the sync source and how many 8th notes you told it are in a cycle. That's down the road a ways because next up (I think) is trying to get a real time kernel on the Pi. Never built a kernel but that's one of those things I don't want to regret never having done (cough).

I've also ordered a Tinkerboard which has about 2x the horsepower of a Raspberry Pi 3B which I'm currently using. Also supposedly the Ethernet port doesn't share resources with the USB section. All these "supposedly"s. I don't actually expect that it will completely eliminate the glitches and xruns, but we shall see.
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