AudioSnap 2.0

I haven't seen any threads about this yet - I got really excited when I read they were upgrading AS, and for me, it would be worth the upgrade price for this alone, if there were significant improvements. Impressions?

Is v1 still available or are we screwed? I hadn't looked yet.

best,
mike

1. what happened to Set Measure/Beat at Now?

Are you saying that the upgrade removes a feature from a past version?  Is there an alternative to replace it?

Is there an alternative to replace it?

I've looked high and low, and I don't think so. It's gone. This is an absolute crime. There are so many things you can do with Set Measure/Beat at Now that you can't do properly or easily with any other tool. It gives you complete control over where you want beats to fall, regardless of transient marker placement. You don't even need an audio clip to use it; you can sync the time ruler to an improvised MIDI clip, which is my primary use of Audiosnap. Without it, the usefulness of the tool is severely compromised. 

Thanks a lot to the whiners who got Cakewalk to take a tool from unintuitive but powerful to "simplified" and useless.

I will absolutely have to continue using 8.3.1 until this "improvement" is reversed.... in 8.5.2, I hope.

yes, it's a bummer.

re: the timestamps: I can't help but think of the irony that it was the fact that I could see all the timestamps at once that alerted me to the fact that AudioSnap doesn't always snap to where you left the marker.

Now if the marker slips/snaps sideways a smidge, that fact is conveniently hidden from you until you get a nagging uneasy feeling that something went wrong... and then instead of seeing where the problem occured quickly, now you will have to search it out like a needle in a hay stack.

What could be easier?

The varied length lines are darn funny... it's like I might forget to look at the wave form and think... "oh my this is a loud part... and this, well, this must be a quiet part". It's nice to have been provided with a visual cue just in case I forget what the waveform drawing is there for.

Burying the diamond markers on the zed line seems like design for designs sake. ( the obvious result of having made the decision to show us the relative amplitudes in the redundant manner I speak of above ). Let's see now, where on the clip drawing will one most likely see the waveform? Right on the center line, that's where. So while it's easy to predict where the symbol can be displayed with no other visual competition the symbol has been placed where there will almost always be visual competition. Of course if you are trying to place the beat line on a zero point it is now more ambiguous where you have placed your line... because it's been displaced with a diamond symbol. So you ave to zoom in and sorta surround the point you are trying to snap to.

bummer.

You may be right about the intention but I looked at a chicken picked guitar track and thought it seemingly followed amplitude.

The fact that it doesn't track amplitudes "correctly" seems to correlate with Audio Snaps tendency to place a transient marker many, many samples in front of the actual transient as shown in the waveform drawing (or playback). So, I just thought it was displaying amplitude within the slop tolerance that Audio Snap already uses. I mean, that's my primary use of the diamond symbols... dragging them to the actual transient point... because Audio Snap can't seem to target them with anything other than near accuracy.

When I heard Audio Snap 2.0 I figured some of those actual problems and bugs may have been fixed... not really, but what else was I supposed to think.

And another thing... is there a reason the Audio Snap palette looks blurry when compared to the underlying SONAR gui? It seems softer... like the fonts have softened edges. More designer design for designers?

Audio Snaps tendency to place a transient marker many, many samples in front of the actual transient as shown in the waveform drawing (or playback).

This has not been a really big issue for me. In my experience, Audiosnap will sometimes put a marker a tick early or late (24 samples at 125BPM and 48kHz), but it's not consistently early, and not usually that far off. But you have to really zoom the amplitude scale all the way in to see what AudioSnap is detecting. Markers might appear to be early if you don't zoom far enough to see the very beginning of the attack. But I'm sure you're aware of this already.

And, of course, this all assumes you are working with material that has very discrete events, like drums. Instruments that produce sustained notes, especially if they have evolving amplitude envelopes (e.g. synth patches with Amp LFO) can result in all kinds of spurious and misplaced markers.

Well, I notice it crashes SONAR more often now, which is odd, and a little lame.  But, at least it's a calm crash, and I can still save my project the way I want before I have to close it all down.

I think you all should give AS v2 a try and enough time to make an informed decision.

I worked with it a little bit last night, setting the project tempo to an acoustic guitar track. Many things were different, but it seemed to take about the same amount of time as v1. I didn't figure out control-M yet - thanks! - but there are other ways to do the same job.

"I think you all should give AS v2 a try and enough time to make an informed decision."

take as long as you need ;-)

brundlefly
If SONAR is still responding enough to save the project I wouldn't call that a "crash". What are the symptoms, and what's going on in SONAR when it happens?

Well I was working with an AudioSnapped clip, and was toggling some options (trying to determine the tempo just for starters) and I noticed a whole bunch of keys had stopped working.  Eventually I noticed another SONAR window had popped up on my taskbar and when I tabbed over to it noticed it was the "SONAR needs to close...blah blah.. should we save a copy... blah blah". But since I had some keyboard/mouse control was able to save normally and then click through the crash dialog.

Happened a second time on another project that was newly created in 8.5.  Only had a few soft synths and the only thing I did was create a MIDI clip with Battery, then bounced it and Audiosnapped it to determine the tempo (I was jamming out on some shaker samples and then wanted to figure out the tempo so I could sequence it properly). So, two soft-synths, one MIDI clip, one Audiosnapped clip.  That's not a lot of things that could cause a crash!

mike_mccue


"I think you all should give AS v2 a try and enough time to make an informed decision."

take as long as you need ;-)

OK, now you made my AS2 crash.

"Enhanced fidelity with Radius Mix Advanced Mode: new Radius Mix settings improve “pitch coherence,” which preserves the naturalness of timbre in human speech, vocals, reed and brass instruments."


Has anybody noticed 'enhanced fidelity'? 


AS2 sounds absolutely brilliant in the write up Cakewalk gave it, I really want to believe them, but so far the response seems to be that they've actually ruined it's usefulness whilst simultaneously making it crash a lot more. I don't think I'll upgrade until we start hearing positive reports about AS. If this is the case, again, AUDIOSNAP IS WORTH DOING PROPERLY!

I don't know...A>S was hard enough for me to wrap my head around, and now keyboard shortcuts need to be memorized...

I used it a little, but always spent waaay too much time using it, but it was/is a brilliant feature. 

I'd love to sink my teeth into a well oiled Audio Snap.

brundlefly


More weirdness:

1. Transient marker timestamps of 1:01:5084, 1:03:4962 and 1:04:5149.

2. A Transient marker within 30 ticks of a 1/4 note gridline is disabled when I set Resolution to 1/8s, and a spurious one nearby that is 235 ticks (about 1/16) from a quarter note becomes enabled.

3. A clip of quarter notes played to a 100BPM click initially has a clip map tempo of 50BPM. I change it to the next higher option of 107BPM, quantize the clip to quarters, bounce it down, and the clip map tempo goes back to 50. I go to change it again, and the next higher option is still 107BPM, even though all the transient markers are now within 2 ticks of a quarter note gridline.

4. Every operation I perform resets the Threshold slider to 75% disabling some of the transients on which the operation was based.

5.Even after setting the Threshold back to 0, one of the transients 1 tick from a quarter note is disabled. i change the resolution form 1/4 to 1/8, and it re-enables.

Guess I'll be keeping a sharp eye out for AudioSnap 2.1. 

Surely Cake must sort this out? It's quite outrageous that they would release a product with as many flaws as are being described with AudioSnap 2.0