Before I continue opening threads asking for help, I thought it would be appropriate to introduce myself a little bit and explain why I use Waveform12.
The context
I play in a typical amateur garage rock band (very amateurish
), making covers of our favorite songs. We have all our day jobs and busy schedules, so it is not uncommon that one of two of us miss the weekly rehearsals. In the past, if the drummer or the singer is missing, it was really bad news and often we cancelled the rehearsal. Then came the workarounds such as having an MP3 backing track (for the vocals) or looking for MIDI drum tracks or even using the basic rhythm machine embedded into one guitar pedal. In one way or another, these were not satisfactory workarounds. When the new AI software came (the one that separates a song into drums, vocals, bass, etc), I thought this was the way to go. The idea is simple, replace the missing person with the proper track. The one that I am using (Moises) even provides a click track and a mobile app. All very convenient and a big improvement from our past situation. However, this solution is not yet perfect. The click track is just a stream of pulses and does not emphasizes the downbeats and the click track apparently doesn't sound right in some songs. Plus, I'd also like to add a voice-over track with the song parts ("Intro", "verse", "Chorus", etc.). So it seems that I needed a DAW to do some editing after the song split.Why Waveform?
First of all, I switched to Linux (Xubuntu) about ten years ago and never looked back. I manage to get things done, one way or another. I'm not opposed to commercial software and I buy sometimes commercial software for Linux when it is reasonably priced for me (<$100), (i.e my rehearsal software Transcribe!). My first experiences with a DAW began two years ago, during the lock-down, when everybody started making collaborative songs from their homes. I volunteered to do the mix-down for a song in the music school where I attend in my neighborhood. The choices for a DAW for Linux were really few and I started using Ardour/Mixbus. It was really, really very hard to get started.
Last week and for the job at hand, I was browsing the Internet for tempo map extraction methods in a DAW and I found . Never heard of this software before but there was a free version for Linux. It piqued my interest. The tool that I needed (Groove Doctor) was not available in the free version. By a fortunate coincidence, it had a Black Friday promo which placed it under my range of interest and price. So I took the plunge.
It was hard to start in another DAW again but thanks to the several tutorials, I manage quite reasonably now. I really love the streamlined GUI, I hope it never changes. After some workarounds that I posted in another thread, the Groove Doctor does the job perfectly well. As in the video tutorial, to extract the tempo map one must choose the downbeats manually, which is tedious and prone to error ... unless you have a macro that automatizes the job. So I pulled out my rusty programming skills and wrote a Javascript macro for this purpose. And now most of the task is done in seconds.
Regarding the song for which apparently the AI software yielded a bad click track in the first minute ... I discovered then that it had detected drums triplets, so I modified the macro to pick one beat out of three and with a bit of manual editing, job done again.
Once the tempo map is adapted to the song, I can structure the song into parts using the Marker track and insert voice-over clips into a new track.
The missing task for the time being is being able to render the Waveform metronome (which emphasizes downbeats) into a separate audio track. I have found .
All in all, very happy using Waveform 12 for my needs.
