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Smoother/Audio Glitch-Free Tempo Changes

Craig Anderton

Active member
In the pre-click track days, tempo changes were how songs "breathed." These changes were not random. A good drummer would deliberately speed up and slow down as appropriate. Often, there would also be a subtle, linear tempo increase over the course of a song. Many people consider Cylde Stubblefield, James Brown's drummer, as a "human metronome" yet his tempo varied considerably. However, because the tempo changes were always musically appropriate and done with extreme precision, the tempo always sounded "right" and super-tight.

Studio One is quite flexible with respect to tempo changes. However, you may notice some little artifacts or glitches due to the stretching. Surprisingly, there's a simple way to fix this. Simply click on the tempo track just before and just after where the glitch occurs. You don't have to change the tempo, just click on the tempo track. I don't know why this works. My theory is that adding more points "resets" the tempo reference, so the stretching works over a smaller range and doesn't have to work so hard at interpolating.

Also, note that you don't have to do tempo changes while tracking a song. It's often more convenient to record with a click track so there aren't any problems with tempo-synced effects following along (particularly time-based ones). However, prior to mastering you can import the final stereo mix into a song, and apply musically appropriate tempo changes.
 
The other day I was doing a major tempo change to a stereo track -- immediately afterwards I listened and heard a number of glitches. Usually, as Craig suggests, I would go back through and make tweaky little changes until the glitches disappeared. But this time I got distracted, and I didn't get back to it for a few minutes. When I returned -- I couldn't find the glitches any more!

What *might* be happening is this: as soon as we request a tempo change, S1 puts up a temporary/rapid/rough version (this would be the one with the audible glitches). Once it has finished it's processing, it replaces the temporary version with the full-quality time-modified soundfile. So -- it may be that it's not necessary to go back and tweak... just wait for the full quality processing to be complete.

--Bill
 
I'm curious - did you check or uncheck "Use cache for timestretched Audio files" under Options > Advanced > Audio?
 
I did not know about that option, so it was at its default value, which appears to be "checked".
 
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