Hi here,
 
First, I use Sonar x3d.
 
Is it me or audiosnap 2.0 have problem detecting every drum hit accurately?
 
I have a kick ddrum trigger track that I want to use as my drum "tightener". The ddrum have been recorded with a mic pre so I have no problems with bad midi triggering. Basically it's a "click" sound copy of the kick drum mic.
 
As you probably know, ddrum piezos have a very focused attack and almost unexisting bleed from other drum parts when recorded like a standard mic through a micpre. So it gives a perfectly clean signal for audiosnap to dectect.
 
At least that's what I thought.
 
Don't know why, but even with a very clear isolated hit, Audiosnap consistently place some automatic marker before the clean hit, at a place where there's absolutely nothing, leaving a perfectly silent gap just before the real hit (which have not been detected).
 
I want to edit a metal drum take, with rapid double-kicks so checking every marker and moving each bad ones by hand would be VERY time consuming, considering that audiosanp SHOULD be able to find every hit since they are all almost bleed free and very well defined...
 
So is there a setting I'm missing or audiosnap is really unreliable for everyone?
 
If so, I'll probably use Melodyne to convert the piezo impulses into midi and then use those midi notes to do the rough quantizing.
 
Any other techniques I'm missing to efficiently edit drums with multiple mics?
 
Thank for any help on this!

Usually when transients are detected early it's because there's some noise preceding the main attack. It's more of a problem when the space between the transients is dead silent, because then even deviation of a couple bits is detected as the start of the transient. It's less of a problem with a live signal having a significant noise floor that swamps those little deviations.
 
I suggest you use Process > Remove silence (without splitting) to gate out everything below about -48dB (the defualt IIRC) on the attack, and below -60dB on the release with a Hold value of about 50ms. That way the first thing the detection algorithm sees will be a sample at a level that can only be part of an actual transient attack.

brundlefly's advice is solid (as always).
 
That said, talking in a more general sense, I feel AudioSnap is coming due for a serious update.

Transient detection is clearly a non-trivial problem, and I expect there'll always be a bit of manual work to do when trying to get the best from any time warping function. But I think there are competitor products that now do a better job. It's now very good in Logic X and Ableton. Still not 100% reliable, but pretty damn impressive.

In the here and now, though, just spending a bit of time to check and tweak your transient markers works wonders.

karl rose also has a great audiosnap video on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weIZy_ibH5c
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VR7WkHywTo
 
cakewalk:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwaXi540fZQ
 
 

I feel audiosnap need a threashold feature. Not the one that filter the automatic transient, but a treashhold that can change the way automatic transient are detected.
 
Like "Detect transients that are at least (X) db" and not "Activate transients that are at least (X) db"
 
The problem is I cannot change the way audiosnap first detect transients. I'm stock with all of them and can't tell the alogorythm "Hey! That's not a snare hit! that's a -52db ride bleed" and "hey!!!! that BIG WAVEFORM IS a Snare hit...  why can't you see that but give me that almost silent ride bleed instead?"
 
This would avoid deplacing manually marker that detect a -48db but do not see a -3db one...
 
I think I will post a picture of the kind of detection problems I'm talking about.

Audiosnap kind of is what it is and the stuff you are describing... well you're kind of stuck having to find workarounds. What I would suggest is increase the Audiosnap Pallette Transient Detection Threshold up high enough so that even if those unwanted transients are being included at least the ones you actually want are being tagged with a marker as well. Then (as laborious as this is) go through and disable the ones you don't want. That way at least you are working with detected transients in their natural Sonar detected spot. Also you are getting the markers added across multiple tracks (if you are working with multi track drums). Then you can use the feature (that I totally forget the name of but it is detailed in the Drum Production webinar available through the Cake TV links) that groups transients across tracks so you can edit them all at once.
 
One thing to note though is with multi track drums you kind of WANT the transients that occur from bleed to be editable in Transients mode. If you leave those transients audible but do not group them and move them in conjunction with the close mic'd track you risk causing phasing and weird crap. If you want to avoid this and do not want the bleed to be audible in your mix and/or don't want to have to group those bleed transients across all tracks apply a gate to each track then bounce them to remove the bleed. After eliminating the bleed (like on your close snare, kick, toms, etc tracks) then you should get a cleaner set of transients and you do not have to worry about screwing things up in regards to phasing on your close mics. You'll still want to be moving your overhead and room transients along with the close mic tracks transients though.
 
The other way is obviously to keep a lower threshold and add markers as needed but doing this manual again can be weird and it is indeed very tedious.
 
Basically this type of work is plain old tedious and Audiosnap is kind of a bugger as it is. My problems with it in the past were performance issues though. It just choked all the time and did not work correctly. Supposed in X3 it is working more like it should but I have yet to test it out.
 
Other programs handle transient manipulation/time correction much better than audiosnap does and I hope that Cake comes out with Audiosnap 3.0 in the next version or completely dumps the whole AS concept in favor of how things are done in other programs. It just is not one of the finer points of the program at this point in time. Perhaps it was revolutionary when it was first introduced but I wasn't around back then.
 
Some hope though, when X3 was first released and I was still pissing and moaning about X2 I mentioned in a thread to one of the Bakers that we need an Audiosnap improvement. He seemed receptive to the idea so maybe, perhaps, possibly, hopefully we'll get it. I am pretty darned happy with X3 at the moment so X4 will likely be a very tough sell for me. If they got AS up to par with the other DAWs though that would probably be enough to make me upgrade all on its own.

Oh and another thing you may want to try is if the auto detect thingy doesn't give you what you want then maybe switch the edit filter back to something else briefly or restart Sonar and try again so it is forced to redetect. I haven't tried this myself but perhaps it will give better results.
 
Another recommendation I would make is increase your interface AND read/write cache buffers because I think AS is real resource hog so maybe that's screwing things up. It may not do anything but still... it couldn't hurt.
 
Cheers and please update the thread if you try my suggestions. I am curious.
 

I've given up on Audiosnap since it seems to always take so much time to even get basic transient detection right. I switch to Ableton when necessary. Now with Melodyne it's even more trivial.

I liked the noise gating trick though! May give that a try next time.

Hi, Sander. The gating/bounce thing is definitely a good way to isolate things a little more if that is what you are going for but obviously it can screw up the hits you actually want to keep. You probably know more than I do so this is likely obvious but for others looking at this option messing with release times and what not is pretty important when trying to get rid of bleed without ruining the hit. I think the Transient Shaper may be an option in this regard or various other compression/gating type tools.
 
However the gating thing is perfect for snagging transients to extract to a MIDI track for replacing recorded drums with samples.
 
One thing that would be cool and maybe this is possible is being able to copy transients from one track to another.
 
Theoretical Example: You gate the original drum tracks so that you are only getting the actual hits even if it is compromising the attack/decay whatever. Bounce the track/clip then switch the filter to transients. Then copy that set of transients to the original track so now you have the clean set of transients created in the gated track on the original making it less work to edit.
 
Can we copy transient markers from track to track?

Sanderxpander
I've given up on Audiosnap since it seems to always take so much time to even get basic transient detection right. I switch to Ableton when necessary. Now with Melodyne it's even more trivial.

You have to be careful when using Melodyne to Quantise Audio in Sonar, whether you are using the Quantise Macro, or manually alighting notes on the Melodyne Grid. There is a bug that is often not very noticeable, but can be major if you're not careful.