I’m trying to sync a 2beats per second soundtrack with the video however I’m having trouble finding the beats when they happen as the audio track is quite hard to see. Even zooming in and playing the video is not effective at telling which part of the audio is a beat as the playback is usually choppy/missing audio.
How can I see the beats more clearly for faster beat sound tracks? I don’t have trouble with slower beats. Is there a way I can temporarily stretch out the audio track?
You can of course make the track taller:
Timeline Menu > Track Height > Make Tracks Taller
But that doesn’t always work since it stretches the entire waveform.
One relatively easy method would be to create a duplicate of your audio clip and use an equalizer filter to mute all frequencies except the bass drum ones.
This should make the beats much easier to see in almost any song’s waveform…
Note: You could also experiment with the other Equalizer filers, if you want to.
At this point, when you listen to the audio, you should mainly hear the beat of the song.
And to save time next time you need to isolate the beats of a song, save this Filter settings as a new Preset
Choose the audio preset of your choice (For example: MP3).
NOTE: If your original audio clip does not start at the first frame of the Timeline, before you export, do this:
After the export is done, delete the copied clip in the Timeline and replace it with the one you just exported. Make sure it is aligned with the original audio clip.
The beats will be a lot easier to see on that audio clip.
When you are done editing your project, you can of course delete this equalized clip.
Wow, great tip, @musicalbox. Immaculately presented post, too. 
Slick!
Thanks @jonray and @Tyrannocaster.
By the way, another option would be to create the duplicate audio clip with Audacity.
The Graphic EQ in Audacity has more bands than the Equalizer: 15-Band of Shotcut. So it might be more accurate for isolating the beat of certain songs.
Or you could go whole hog and use Reaper. I don’t see why anybody would even bother with Audacity when Reaper is so much more powerful. It comes with tons of free (but very good) plugins for eq, reverb or whatever, and while the program itself is technically not free, the demo version never expires and is unlimited. I think they felt that if people used it for a while the ridiculously low price would prompt them to pony up. Worked for me, and I’m a really hard sell. 
(Reaper will also let you put your video in it when you’re working on the soundtrack, and you can even edit the video, although not as thoroughly as you would in a dedicated video editor. But still.)
But I think the method described in the post should work well enough to see where the beat is.
Depends of your needs I guess. Why use Shotcut when DaVinci Resolve have all these fancy features? Why use simple shears to prune the trees and bushes in your garden instead of a chainsaw that is so much more powerful? 
There is also the Band Pass or Low Pass audio filters, which is designed to isolate frequency ranges.
One good reason is that it’s very difficult to install on linux, another is that it freezes my Windows 7 machine every time forcing a reboot, and that’s with the last version for 7. So I’ve never been able to use Resolve. On the other hand, I’m really familiar with Reaper and have tried Audacity several times, always being underwhelmed by the experience in comparison. So much of all this comes down to what you’re used to.
@Jaedan_Narayan , @MusicalBox , @shotcut , @Tyrannocaster - Another idea - use colour clips to help you navigate to the beats, like so:
I don’t use Reaper, but I have Cubase (pro version). However, I’m with @musicalbox - I use Audacity all the time for relatively simple things like checking the audio levels of an audio file, adding amplify effect (ie adding gain). Horses for courses!
People tend to think of Reaper as a sequencer (which it certainly is) but it is also the best audio editor I’ve found. It loads incredibly quickly, uses little memory and runs on all platforms. It’s not overkill at all to use it for simpler tasks, which I do all the time. It’s fast, light, and it approaches infinite configurability.
I’m a fan! But for the purpose the OP intended I think Shotcut’s built-in tools would suffice.
Maybe I will re-visit Reaper now!! Thanks @Tyrannocaster !
If you have questions, Kenny Gioia’s incredible YouTube channel can probably answer them. The guy is amazing. https://www.youtube.com/@REAPERMania
The Reaper forum is also a fantastic resource: REAPER General Discussion Forum - Cockos Incorporated Forums
The entire Reaper download is only 15 megs! Talk about efficient.
Thanks @Tyrannocaster. 15megs! I’ll check it out!
This is what I like about this forum. I have never heard of Reaper before, but it looks like something to look into. I have used Goldwave and Audacity and there are features I like from both. Goldwave doesn’t work in Linux. Thanks for the heads up.
Definitely. I’ve been using it since 2010, so that’s a lot of iterations. It’s incredibly powerful, period. I keep a copy running on my linux machine just to practice against, but because of the huge number of vst plugins I have that only work with Windows I do all my audio on Windows 7, which Reaper still supports. Because of all the options, Reaper can be intimidating to a new user, but most people don’t come close to using everything it offers; just just figure out how to do what you need and don’t worry about everything else it can do.
Reaper’s head developer is the guy who made Winamp, for you fossils with long memories.
EDIT: Just uploaded a new video made with Shotcut, audio done in Reaper:
This time I rendered it in 1440 and the result at 1080 looks a LOT better than what YouTube usually does. Ilearned this trick on this forum.
For exact cuts and inserts I work exclusively with WAV files. With mp3 the desired result is quite random!
This topic was automatically closed after 90 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
