3rd Party Beat Gridding and BPM detection for Traktor

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3rd Party Beat Gridding and BPM detection for Traktor
Posted on: 27.07.2012 by Freida Leash
I really find that Traktor beat gridding and BPM detection really doesn't work all that well, I would accept 5% failure but I find it fails closer to 15% for me that one of these two things fails. I usually just get over it and enter the correct BPM and nudge tracks into sync when it does fail, or bother to re-grid the track, but usually just decide to live with it and beat match. I was wondering because google hasn't turned it up any tools, if any one knows of a third party tool that will set these correctly? My track collection has grown to the point of getting the older stuff proper as way more time consuming than useful, and just living with it.

Frequent mistakes are:
I know a track runs at 174bpm Traktor shows 130bpm
It is way off the kick, so manually beat matching or adjusting the grid is necessary
Doesn't really set the 1 beat correct much like above on tracks that have weird intros

I work around this, but am hoping there is a tool I haven't heard about that makes all this easier. This is all pretty much Drum and Bass, seems like other genres these tools out of the box work better.
Danae Dumler
27.07.2012
Originally Posted by rdale
I catch it before that, like hmm... this import looks messed up. Seems there should be a better option.
Yeah there should be but there isn't, heh. But since you know about it you can fix it pretty quickly. Whenever I see "dubstep" and "105" I just plug in 140 and hit enter, bang, the grid is perfect after that. Seems like you can do the same with dnb (though the bpm is slightly less predictable... only slightly though)
Danae Dumler
27.07.2012
Originally Posted by rdale
I know a track runs at 174bpm Traktor shows 130bpm
This is common with dubstep too - 140 shows 105. It's a harmonic of the actual beat value; 140 is exactly 1.33333333333 times 105. And I'm guessing 174 is the same with 130 or close. If you actually look at the grid, the markers are probably on all the same transients (or exactly the same distance from them) from start to finish even though it makes no sense which beats they're on if you actually listen to the song. I see this in dubstep songs about 5-10% of the time, maybe less; not sure because I kind of got bored with dubstep six months or so ago and haven't been buying a lot of it lately. Haven't seen it in dnb as much but I grid dnb at half time so maybe it figures that out -- I set my limits to 80-160 roughly so dnb generally grids at 86-89 rather than in the 170s, and it probably sorts out the math that way since the mistake number would be out of range.

The other errors you cite are common; Traktor's autogrid feature is often a half beat behind or ahead of the actual beat for some reason (and other times it's random if you have a weird intro).

As for what to do about it, take a minute to check the grid before playing the song out. When I import a bunch of songs to Traktor I usually spend an hour or so going through them and checking the grids. I never get through them all, but the ones I check I click the "lock" button once I'm sure they're good. That way when I play out, I know which tracks I'm confident in the grids with right away, and I either don't play the others, or if I must play one, I beatmatch it. But really if you can't spend 20 seconds listening to a song before you play it out, you probably don't need to be playing it out.

I did a youtube video on gridding dnb and dubstep for Traktor Pro 1.whatever but I'm too lazy to look it up before clicking post Look for "beatgrids revisited" though I believe.
Freida Leash
27.07.2012		I really find that Traktor beat gridding and BPM detection really doesn't work all that well, I would accept 5% failure but I find it fails closer to 15% for me that one of these two things fails. I usually just get over it and enter the correct BPM and nudge tracks into sync when it does fail, or bother to re-grid the track, but usually just decide to live with it and beat match. I was wondering because google hasn't turned it up any tools, if any one knows of a third party tool that will set these correctly? My track collection has grown to the point of getting the older stuff proper as way more time consuming than useful, and just living with it.

Frequent mistakes are:
I know a track runs at 174bpm Traktor shows 130bpm
It is way off the kick, so manually beat matching or adjusting the grid is necessary
Doesn't really set the 1 beat correct much like above on tracks that have weird intros

I work around this, but am hoping there is a tool I haven't heard about that makes all this easier. This is all pretty much Drum and Bass, seems like other genres these tools out of the box work better.
Freida Leash
27.07.2012		I half time all my DnB too... it really helps when trying to set the grid proper as there is more room on the wave form between beats and I find the groove half time in my personal count. Was really hoping someone else has figured this out and wants to charge me money to make it work with out putting in effort. Dubstep has been 100% either 70 or 140bmp or so for me, i'm going to have to dig and see if a compilation has turned up something odd.
Corrin Penney
27.07.2012		I too had problems with bpm detection on dnb. I had my bpm autogrid range from 120 - 180 (or something like that) and it'd always balls it up & i'd have to re-grid. Long.

Then in Traktor 2.5 i left the autogrid at 60-200 and now nearly 100% of my grids are spot on, or at least close enough for me to not care.
Danae Dumler
27.07.2012
Originally Posted by rdale
I catch it before that, like hmm... this import looks messed up. Seems there should be a better option.
Yeah there should be but there isn't, heh. But since you know about it you can fix it pretty quickly. Whenever I see "dubstep" and "105" I just plug in 140 and hit enter, bang, the grid is perfect after that. Seems like you can do the same with dnb (though the bpm is slightly less predictable... only slightly though)
Danae Dumler
27.07.2012
Originally Posted by rdale
I know a track runs at 174bpm Traktor shows 130bpm
This is common with dubstep too - 140 shows 105. It's a harmonic of the actual beat value; 140 is exactly 1.33333333333 times 105. And I'm guessing 174 is the same with 130 or close. If you actually look at the grid, the markers are probably on all the same transients (or exactly the same distance from them) from start to finish even though it makes no sense which beats they're on if you actually listen to the song. I see this in dubstep songs about 5-10% of the time, maybe less; not sure because I kind of got bored with dubstep six months or so ago and haven't been buying a lot of it lately. Haven't seen it in dnb as much but I grid dnb at half time so maybe it figures that out -- I set my limits to 80-160 roughly so dnb generally grids at 86-89 rather than in the 170s, and it probably sorts out the math that way since the mistake number would be out of range.

The other errors you cite are common; Traktor's autogrid feature is often a half beat behind or ahead of the actual beat for some reason (and other times it's random if you have a weird intro).

As for what to do about it, take a minute to check the grid before playing the song out. When I import a bunch of songs to Traktor I usually spend an hour or so going through them and checking the grids. I never get through them all, but the ones I check I click the "lock" button once I'm sure they're good. That way when I play out, I know which tracks I'm confident in the grids with right away, and I either don't play the others, or if I must play one, I beatmatch it. But really if you can't spend 20 seconds listening to a song before you play it out, you probably don't need to be playing it out.

I did a youtube video on gridding dnb and dubstep for Traktor Pro 1.whatever but I'm too lazy to look it up before clicking post Look for "beatgrids revisited" though I believe.
Ulysses Vittetoe
27.07.2012		Using the metronome makes gridding tracks really fast and easy. Set your bpm, turn on metronome, drop a grid marker, fine tune it, drop your cue points, done. Takes me ~1 minute per song, and I get some piece of mind.
Freida Leash
27.07.2012		I catch it before that, like hmm... this import looks messed up. Seems there should be a better option.
Latoria Kavulich
27.07.2012		I take it you use the autogrid function mate. I've never used it. Nothing worse than a badly gridded tune popping up mid set eh.

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