Ableton Forum

I am starting my quarterly amateur DJ prep again, and as always, I am baffled by this:

Why is live so very unreliable at correctly guessing the bpm *and* the beats of most dance tracks?

Usually, Live decides on some kind of weird decimal fraction (135.99 BPM) when the real BPM is a whole number. The result: a track that floats out of time as it plays. By the end of the song, the beats *plainly* don't match up to the grid markers.

Why does the algorithm get it so wrong?

I mean, one massive clue should be that 217 bar song warped at the wrong bpm will show up as having a different length from start to finish as the unwarped track. Surely these are things that Live's warping and analysis routines should be able to get right?

And other packages (traktor, for example) routinely get the beats right with ease.

So why does Lipe, supposedly the software that pioneered warping, get it so wrong?

I am just wondering

use a 909 with 120 bpm and you will not get a exact 120bpm recording. it's the same with recorded vinyl or recorded material. Just some thought....I think it could be possible that the traktor algorithm is tweaked specific with the only purpose of detecting BPM from whole tracks. I guess in ableton is mandatory to use an more universal approach.

not saying that the algorithm can't be better in ableton, but I don't have a problem here. That said, I would check my stuff manually in any case, when you're serious about it.

Actually Live's beat detection has gotten much better over the years. Especially considering that "back in the day" with Live 4, that feature didn't exist at all and you had to warp everything by hand.

That said, I've got a library of several thousand tracks, almost all of them warped by hand. It gets tedious doing all this work, and for awhile I switched to Traktor Pro, since this particular project was just doing regular DJ mixing and didn't require any special Live stuff. However, I was not incredibly surprised to discover that Traktor also sucks at beat detection in the same way as Live. So much for the magic bullet, I guess.

Anyways, long story short, either beatmatch by hand or take the 20 seconds to warp the tracks yourself (I counted!). It'll continue to improve throughout new Live releases, but it's a problem that will never be 100% solved.

i find the actual bpm calculated is pretty spot on, but generally the 1 is poorly placed. Rightclick where it should be, set 1.1.1, then 'warp from here'. Doublecheck how the beats align near the end of the track (or after the breakdown), hit save and you're done. 20 seconds is about right...