SUMMARY UPDATE 04.2011:
Basics things we are missing:
- Warp or transient markers that can are saved along with the track like ProTools or Sonar would do.
- The ability for an item to slave to the tempo map. In other words “follow temp map” as Sonar would put it. (They currently support only the start of an item syncing to the tempo map.
- With these two actions and along with many others that they already have they could implement the more sophisticated:
- “audio quantization”
- “Learn song tempo from audio”
- Multi-track audio quantizing with out cuts
Basic things we have:
- Detect transients (on the fly) (tab to transients)
- Dynamic spits
- Visual Transient detection adjustments
- Splitting at transients ( single multi track)
- Media time base of: Start of Beat, Beat start and stretch, and time based
- Quantizing the start of audio clips
---------------------
Elastic audio (or whatever you want to call it) allows non-destructive time stretching of events, usually for aligning a performance to the grid or tempo. I propose:
1) Transient detection (a la dynamic split and tab to transient) but instead of splitting an item, it simply puts a sort of marker on the transient itself. So, for example, there would be a vertical line at the start of every kick drum hit.
2) The transient markers should be able to be clicked and dragged around. Moving a marker would stretch the audio on each side and effectively move the transient around in time. It should only stretch to the next transient marker on each side. Ideally, there would be a way to enable/disable specific transient markers to clean up false positives or add in missed notes.
3) A fancy quantize to grid dialogue for audio events. This would allow you to quantize the transient markers to the grid automatically, including options for swing percentage, strength percentage, humanize, and ignoring or only correcting markers that are within or outside of a certain range near the marker. So, for example, any transients that are already within 20ms or 8% of the grid could be ignored, to keep the "human" feel. There should also be options to quantize to half notes, quarter notes, sixteenth, etc.
Extra thoughts:
This should support grouping of tracks (especially drum tracks) and applying the same stretching across all the tracks. So you can quantize the snare, but it will stay synced up with overheads, etc.
All the functionality of this request is built into Reaper already, more or less, except for the transient markers. All we need is a clean, unified interface.
reference thread:
http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=19241