dhjdhjdhj

I have a short wave file (length is 4 beats) that I need to play as a loop and that will be heard for about 16 bars at occasional points in the song.

I'm going to have to feed our drummer with a click derived from this loop so that he can make sure that the band is always playing at the right speed for when the loop is audible.

I know I can use sfplay~ to play the wave file and I could use the seek message to start and end it (the actual loop is a few samples less than the actual wavefile) and retrigger that seek message from the bang that's generated each time the wave file plays.

The problem is that I need to generate a click that triggers every beat, not every 4 beats and I'm wondering how best to do that.

The "obvious" solution that comes to my mind is to have four sfplay~ objects each of which has a seek message with 1 beat's worth of sample start/end time and then daisy chain them using the "end of play" bang that comes out (and using that bang to generate a click), but this seems quite kludgy.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a cleaner solution for this.

I have a short wave file (length is 4 beats) that I need to play as a loop and that will be heard for about 16 bars at occasional points in the song.
I'm going to have to feed our drummer with a click derived from this loop so that he can make sure that the band is always playing at the right speed for when the loop is audible.

suggestions-for-how-to-generate-a-click-track-syncd-to-wave-file

I'm not even sure the 'seek' message is good enough as it only seems to have a resolution of 1 millisecond and I would need to have sample-accurate playback to avoid clicks in between each chunk.

By the way, I looked at splitting up the original wave file into four parts which could then be loaded into buffers and played back using the [groove~] object but there does not seem to be any way to detect when [groove~] has finished playing one buffer so that the next one can be started.

How about recording your click track and then sync'n the playback of the two files.

(This is turning into a documentary on problem solving - but maybe it will be useful to someone else)

Looks like I might be able to just have the entire loop in [groove] and then use snapshot to detect the current position and then trigger something every quarter of the way through.

caveat, i am not yet fully awake. here is what i use for click tracks when playing back from (groove).

OK, problem solved --- I suspect this has been solved many times but here's my quick hack solution in case it's useful to anyone.

Sorry, I didn't realize that others had replied and so I apologize for having ignored the posts (just noticed via email).

@kthozoid, my sympathies, I've been up since 4:30am having realized last night that I was going to have to figure something out.

Thanks for your suggestion, which I will have to study, it seems a lot more complicated than what I did so I presume it has other benefits that I don't yet understand.

Sorry, I didn't realize that others had replied and so I apologize for having ignored the posts (just noticed via email).
@kthozoid, my sympathies, I've been up since 4:30am having realized last night that I was going to have to figure something out.
Thanks for your suggestion, which I will have to study, it seems a lot more complicated than what I did so I presume it has other benefits that I don't yet understand.


@dhj, no worries. indeed my solution is probably overcooked. it just has a few extra functionalities for metric sub-divisions and altering the click track sounds and that kind of thing.

@dhj, no worries. indeed  my solution is probably overcooked. it just has a few extra functionalities for metric sub-divisions and altering the click track sounds and that kind of thing.


ok ---- I am not generating the click sound inside Max --- I will be sending MIDI events to a remote device that the drummer can hear. So I just needed to make sure that I could break up a long loop into the right number of even segments....not having much familiarity with the MSP side of Max, I wasn't aware of [groove] and more importantly [snapshot]. Once I discovered the latter, the problem became trivial for me.

ok, then your solution will do just fine then. and here is a quick (sfplay) version just for the general purpose of completion. 

I just noticed that the groove stuff using a buffer seems to only have audio coming out one channel. The example for groove shows a single channel being split into two. How can I play a stereo sample?

Thanks, pid, I had tried that before (although I used a positive value for the duration (while being annoyed that I had to put the duration before the number of channels so glad to see one can put -1 there) and it didn't work. I'll check that again.

This doesn't work --- unless I'm doing something really stupid (which is quite possible), there's something else wrong.

I've attached the patches (and the stereo aiff file) if you're willing to take a quick look

This doesn't work --- unless I'm doing something really stupid (which is quite possible), there's something else wrong.
I've attached the patches (and the stereo aiff file) if you're willing to take a quick look


Hmmm, that's Max 6 --- I'm doing it with Max 5 right now --- I wonder if that's an issue.

(But at least I know there's nothing wrong with the sample or my patcher)

Hmmm, that's Max 6 --- I'm doing it with Max 5 right now --- I wonder if that's an issue.
(But at least I know there's nothing wrong with the sample or my patcher)


Suggestions for how to generate a click track sync'd to wave file