Beat Detective

Beat Detective is Digidesign Pro Tools’s proprietary means of analyzing, editing and manipulating audio or MIDI material that is rhythmic in nature.

Beat Detective overview

Beat Detective can be accessed via Events>Beat Detective

Beat Detective is a tool for manipulating and editing audio material that is rhythmic in nature.
With Beat Detective you can:
Extract a tempo map from audio or MIDI material.
Create a digigroove (groove template)
Conform audio to a tempo map
Conform the MIDI track tempo to an audio region

Operation

The first menu in the operation window is Operation:.
This is used to define if the material to be affected is MIDI or Audio

Bar|Beat Marker Generation

This mode creates bar and beat markers that correlate to the detected transients of an audio or MIDI section. This mode creates a tempo map from the selection and applies it to the session.

Groove Template Extraction

This mode detects the transients and dynamic information of an audio or MIDI region and creates quantization grooves from the information.It then saves this information either the groove clipboard or as a DigiGroove template file to a selected directory.

Region Separation

This mode detects transients in the audio region selection(s) and makes new regions based on the information.

Region Conform (Audio Only)

This mode conforms all separated audio regions within a selection to the current tempo map. It can also conform audio regions to groove templates in addition to standard quantization.

Edit Smoothing (Audio Only)

This mode is used to fill in spaces between audio regions by trimming them and creating optional crossfades.This mode is typically used to smooth edits after using the Region Separation and/or Region Conform modes

Selection

The selection area is used to define the range of the material you wish to affect.

• Start Bar | Beat – This is the the start point of the of the region you will analyze and is user defined.
• End Bar | Beat – This end point of the region you will analyze and is user defined.
• Time Signature – This is the time signature setting. This is user defined.
• Quantization value – This value affects regions differently depending on Operation selection value
• 3 – This indicates a triplet signature.

Detection

The Detection section is used to generate beat triggers to initiate the functions selected in the Operation section