MC8 forcing me to use wrong tempo [solved]

[lingyai]

I have a song which was played to a 105 bpm click track. Here is a snippet of the click track.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f36wt3q2ajt8o ... m.mp3?dl=0

When I start a new project in MC8, I set the tempo to 105 bpm and drag the full click track audio clip in from windows explorer. I get a dialogue suggesting that for the best sound quality, I change the project tempo to match what MC8 thinks is the click's true tempo, i.e. 120 bpm.

If I say no, i.e I just import the file and keep the tempo set at 105 bpm, the audio plays back too slow.

If I say yes, letting MC8 change the tempo to 120 bpm, the audio plays back fine, but when I play MC8's metronome during playback, that's obviously too fast, the audio and metronome definitely don't sync up.

So the price I pay to hear the audio correctly is to surrender to MC8's mistaken tempo clock, which means among other things that none of my tempo-dependent VSTis (arps etc) and FX ( delays) will play in sync; grid-based editing becomes impossible etc.

I don't recall having this problem before.

Is there a way I can override whatever MC8 is doing, i.e. just tell it to believe me when I say the tempo is 105 bpm, and not to stretch the audio in any way? Unless I'm missing something, in trying to be helpful, MC8 is getting it wrong and crippling me.

Grateful for any advice.

[lingyai]

Does this happen to any one else with this file, by chance?

[JonInc]

I dragged it into MC8 and Cakewalk. Both times it shows 120bpm.

[lingyai]

If you play it in MC8 with the metronome at 120 bpm, do they match? Not here.

Even just counting beats for 15 secs -- I count 26. 26 x 4 = 104 bpm.

Ok, I counted imperfectly, in 15 seconds it should beat 26.25 times.

But for this to be truly 120 bpm, you'd have to hear 30 beats in 15 seconds. I challenge any one to try to count to 30 evenely over the drum.

This site

https://tunebat.com/Analyzer

says it's 105 bpm. So does Melodyne.

Something weird here. Maybe these were mistakenly BPM-stamped by the source (it's a guy who got the tracks from his producer friend). It's definitely not 120 bpm.

Has anyone seen this sort of behaviour in MC8 before? If used it for I guess around 400-500 hours and this is new to me.

[JonInc]

Have you audibly checked the beats against a metronome? I did, and it comes out to about 118 bpm. Not perfect, but rounding up, that's 120.

Add to that two different DAWs say the clip is 120 bpm. I don't know what else to say...

[JonInc]

Okay, I checked the speed of the loop again by metronome without dragging it into a DAW...

It checks out at 105 bpm!

But then after dragging it into either Mixcraft or Cakewalk, it play back at 120 bpm.

So yeah, looks like there's something odd with the clip.

[lingyai]

Fixed it!

Following my hunch from my last post, that these files, from a 3rd party, might have had some sort of erroneous acid-style bpm metdata, I

-opened each of the files in Wavosaur
-saved them under new names
-started a new MC8 project, specifying 105 bpm
-dragged in the drum loop, got a dialogue suggesting that for ideal audio quality etc I change the project tempo, not to 120 bpm, as before, but to 105.4 bpm. I said ok.
-dragged in the other instrument parts.
-pressed play with the metronome on. MC8 and the audio are now in perfect sync.

Learn something every day!

Thank goodness. I feared I'd have to use ACID Pro, which I still have a copy of, but which is so much clunkier than MC8. MC8 is like Kansas, no place like home...