I have to agree with Rhino here.
AFAIK, Cubase detects transients as hitpoints, and uses those to detect the tempo. However, when the material doesn’t include clear transients the tempo detection precision goes down the toilet. You are obligated to use a track with clear transients.
Melodyne, on the other hand, detects tempo via its DNA technology to detect not only the transients, but the pitch changes of every note. If that weren’t enough, it also uses information from all tracks, whereas Cubase’s tempo detection can only be triggered by a selection consisting of a single event.
I´ve used Melodyne to detect the tempo of tracks with subtle transients such as chamber or choral music, and the tempo detection is still about 85% correct. Not perfect, but waaaay better than what Cubase can do.
So yes, if you´re detecting tempo right from a drum track, then Cubase is up to the challenge, but not every piece of music has a rhythmic backing track of this kind.
I´ve always thought, that the day Steinbrg develops something like DNA into variaudio, Melodyne will go down. But so far, that’s very much not the case.
In my opinion, Melodyne’s handling of signature changes and tempo subdivision changes is more intuitive. Maybe I have to fiddle more with Cubase, given that “I live there”.
I think the main source of these difficulties, is that the user manual doesn’t really explain how to handle tempo detection properly within a specific context. Steinberg should embark in the production of training videos such as the ones on the Celemony website. Of course its a staggering project because Cubase is freaking huge, but I’m just saying, having Steinberg’s official approach to tempo detection would help A LOT.
But the approach would have to go beyond “lets detect the tempo of this drum track”. This video would have to include subjects like ritardandos, types of subdivision, signature changes and tempo changes, double metre, triple metre, polirhythm, etc.
@mr.roos
Glad it works for you, but here on Cubase Pro 10.3 it rather doesn’t.
With most audio tracks (even those with quite a clean beat throughout),I get funny spikes (up and down) in the generated tempo track all over the place, and all these (not at all working) spikes completely spoil the result. Editing them manually one by one would take much too much time, so the function doesn’t really work here either.
As long as I don’t find a reason and a solution for this erratic behavior, I have no other choice than hope for better Melodyne ARA integratin like the OP as well.
Goodness, you are right. Why is tempo detection so inconsistent?
Anyway, I will have to settle with exporting a MIDI tempo map from Melodyne and moving it over to Cubase. There is a preference you need to disable in order for that to work (thanks to Hippo for this tip)
So normally the checkbox for this setting is checked (enabled) such that you Ignore Master Track Events on Merge, when working with Superior, EZKeys etc,… @Hippo was suggesting you uncheck/disable that setting in this instance, when importing a tempo map generated from Melodyne…
So, maybe a bit less onerous, when you know you’re only switching it off once to do the import, then immediately go and switch it back on… maybe…?
Well, I haven´t fiddled with tempo import a lot, but what you´re saying is consistent with my experience. There’s a little deviation on the tempo. In Melodyne it feels spot on perfect, and then when you import it to Cubase, it falls behind a tiny bit.
I haven´t tried this, but maybe by extracting the tempo from one specific track in Melodyne and then using that same track as reference within Cubase, we could find the exact deviation and use the keyboard shortcut for “locate next hitpoint” to test if the location of the first hitpoint is the ideal place to cut and move the event to make it coincide with the imported tempo.
It looks like a solid plan Rhino. We could even try to squeeze everything into an AHK macro that triggers Cubase’s macros.
In my opinion, the trickiest part is to move the events to whichever position is necessary. Doing this through a macro, I don´t know how it would be possible.
Trial and error I guess.
