Mr Nimbus

22nd August 2002 15:50 UTC

Beat Keeper not keeping
Does anyone else find the beat keeper function in AVS completely and utterly useless for dance music?

It would be good to be able to manually start the beat counter by clicking the mouse. Thats how good ones seem to work.
:confused:

dirkdeftly

23rd August 2002 04:27 UTC

If you're talking about Nic01's Beat Keeper, it was (as I saw it) basically a coding triumph, showing off to the AVS community (good job Nic!). Not necessarily for viewing pleasure, but it's still pretty darn cool, man.

That and there's no mouse control with AVS, except for the 'double click for config' message.


Unless you're talking about something else...

Nic01

23rd August 2002 07:02 UTC

My beat keeper depends entirely on AVS's beat detection.. if it doesn't keep beats...

To start it with the mouse (Yes it's possible... sorta) : Disable the first list (uncheck that checkbox), quit AVS, start AVS, start the song, and check the "enable" checkbox when you want to start counting.

Even then, it won't be accurate... That's because of AVS's poor beat detection... for that, you can rant to Nullsoft (The AVS development team specifically) (No good turnout is likely), and fortunately enough, it's in the big list o' wishes in the wishes forum (I think... I think there's only mouse-clicking to help detecting beats on the list).

curlymop

24th August 2002 12:27 UTC

The avs (or whatever u call them) wont move, bump or do anything with the music why?
The avs (or whatever u call them) wont move, bump or do anything with the music why?
why wont they dance, is it because my beat detector isnt working i got it set like this
advanced is checked
auto-keep is checked
predict only if bpm has been found is checked
adapt from known bpm is checked

are they right or not or is it the vis wich wont go to my music
and my site is pretty cool u may wont to check it out
blah

Nic01

24th August 2002 18:04 UTC

Advanced - Most of the time, only gives less beats (Though a bit more in sync)

Autokeep - Once it got a good BPM, it keeps it at that BPM. So if it gets the BPM while it's still quite silent, practically no beats.

Predict only if bpm had been found - Predicts the next beat to happen - if checked, AVS will only predict the next beat once a BPM is found. Uncheck it for AVS to predict most of the time.

Adapt from known bpm - Compares current song to another song with a known BPM. If it's close, it will help AVS (Hopefully).

Mr Nimbus

26th August 2002 02:51 UTC

Its about the beat
I can only presume the beet keeper is not well done at all.
I Play mostly dance music with a very defined and 'easy' to extract beat.
The keeper tries to sync to triplets for some bizzare reason!!
Ill be playing something 135bpm and it will tell me the beat is a firm 100 or so bpm.
Surely if you can graphically display a waveform, EQ it and change levels, you can easily extract a rough time code from it.

Pick a variable from the wave display in winamp and use that. ???

Perhaps the bandwidth the beat keeper is listening to is simply too wide??? (should be somewhere between 300Hz and 1Khz)

Mr Nimbus

26th August 2002 02:54 UTC

As a short remedy... Im sure most people can guess a beat much better than the avs counter,
Perhaps there could be a way of typing in the approximate beat, and selecting 'adapt from known'.
That would be far more accurate, and allow for deliberate off-beat cycles too.

Jaheckelsafar

26th August 2002 03:55 UTC

Nobody's gonna be editing the AVS code. Sorry. This is all we have to work with. It works pretty well for me.

dirkdeftly

26th August 2002 06:46 UTC

Common problem with poopaholic, methinks. If you're using a CD, vis's (in general) will not work. You have to use files on the hard drive.

And don't go into ranting and raving about 'well Winamp sux they should fix it' - it's the same way with other programs I've encountered, and no one else has AVS. So deal with it :P
(this is a preemptive strike against bitch flame warring :))

Rovastar

26th August 2002 10:48 UTC

Beat detection is very hard to too. Personally I think we a many, many years off getting 'any' computer to always get the beat.

I have tried to write my own music beat detection it is very difficult, maybe immpossible. Esp for the 'real time' beat detection - not 'reseting' every track. A pretty detailed chat about this is in the MilkDrop forums here http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....highlight=beat
for those of you that are interested. Also talking about 'different styles' of music detection rather than just the beat.

Things like fps also efffect the perception of gettting the beat. A slow fps then obviously you can 'miss' the beat just by having the screen refresh it could be fraction of a second off.

AVS is not that bad (although probably not the best) and unlikely to be changed. I mean do Nullsoft even look at these forums.:)

Hope it helps.......

Xion(810)

26th August 2002 20:00 UTC

Originally posted by Atero
Common problem with poopaholic, methinks. If you're using a CD, vis's (in general) will not work. You have to use files on the hard drive.

UnConeD

26th August 2002 20:11 UTC

I agree Rovastar... beat detection IS very hard. I think you're forgetting that human 'beat-detection' is an advaced spectral analysis organ (the inner ear and 'spiral') coupled to a sophisticated neural net.

Even songs that seem to have a regular, loud beat can still be very chaotic on the spectral graph. The same range that is occupied by the bass drum is also filled with bass riffs and such.

Rovastar

27th August 2002 02:58 UTC

Steve,

NOte: I am drunk now so making less sense then normal.

:)

And that says a lot. :)

Oh I forgot to say that no computer can detect a 'beat' more than a human can. There is more chat ablout this in the link. I did fogot to say all this.....sorry. Hopefully I implied I lot of what I said.........:)

I hope that clears that up.:)

UnConeD

27th August 2002 05:38 UTC

You're funny when druk :D

Rovastar

27th August 2002 10:11 UTC

:):D

I thought I did pretty well in that post considering what I am normally like.:)

I was pretty proud of it....considering.:)

dirkdeftly

27th August 2002 19:28 UTC

Back on topic...
Xion, make sure if you say something like that that you make sure you clearly state your tone of 'voice' - otherwise it comes across pissed off and agitated, which it shouldn't be in this case...and if it was, calm down, it's just AVS.

Are you sure AVS was responding to a beat, and it wasn't just coincidentally bouncing along right next to the beat? And the shoutcast thing goes back to what I was saying before: AVS doesn't respond to anything and everything you play in Winamp.