Adobe Audition: How to view beats

[jsak]

Hey guys I'm new to the forum! Hope i get a good welcome

I was wondering if it is possible to view the beats of a song in Adobe Audition 3. Basically I want to view the beats of a song. Not just the wave format because its hard for me to put songs over songs without being able to see where the EXACT beat is in the song.

Thanks!

 

[Bobbsy]

It's probably not exactly what you want but if you go to the View/Time Display menu, one of the options will be "Bars and Beats". This will give you a display counting in that format and the scale along the bottom of the screen is a count of bars and individual beats.

It's not something I use much (well, not al all!) so I can't vouch for how accurate it is...I tend to just zoom in and use the peaks on the waveform to help me judge where a beat is.

 

[jsak]

So basically there isn't a way to see the actual time points of the beats. You can only use wave form to determine it?

 

[Bobbsy]

Well, in the display mode I suggested, the time display along the edge of the view will be calibrated in beats rather than minutes and seconds--but Audition is only doing this by analysing the waveform the same way you would so, quite possibly you'll be more accurate than the software.

Audition is primarily an audio editor not a piece of "music creation software" so I suspect there may be other packages out there that do more like what you want.

 

[jsak]

Thanks for your help! what would be examples of "music creation software"?

 

[Bobbsy]

Well, two I know of are Cuebase and Sonar--with their ability to act as a sequencer as well as do audio recording and editing, they are much more for people actually creating music. I'm sure there are others as well!

(FYI, I don't know if either of the ones I mention locate beats the way you want--I'm an Audition user. However, it might be worth checking them out and/or doing a post in a more general forum to see what users recommend.)

 

[ErichS]

Audition 3 actually has a primitive "Find Beats" function under the "Edit" menu. Unfortunately, it seems you have to run this one beat at a time and manually add the beat to the marker list (as a beat type) . There are also some settings to adjust the sensitivity. This is extremely tedious but it works if your beats are fairly clear.