Find the Beats

Find the Beats isn’t on the web, which doesn’t play recordings: open the song in Stab on a Mac, a PC, an iPad, an iPhone or Android. Pins found there stay in the song.

Finding the beats

1. Right-click the recording’s lane.
2. Choose Find the Beats, then:
   • Pin Every Beat: a pin on each beat. The tightest fit, for a performance that moves within the bar.
   • Pin Every Bar: a pin on each bar’s first beat only, with the beats in between spread evenly. Fewer pins to check.

The first beat it hears as a bar’s start lands on the nearest barline of the song, and a pickup before it is kept. A compound meter such as 6/8 is counted in dotted beats. The whole recording is heard, and all its pins are placed in one undo step. The recording then leads the song: see Who leads.

When it’s done, a note over the pane says what it found, for example “Found 212 beats, about 96 BPM: 212 pins placed”. If it hears nothing steady, it says “No beat found in this recording”.

Find the Beats needs the recording’s sound: it’s greyed out until the recording has loaded, and on a YouTube video, whose sound Stab can’t read. Tap the pins in there instead, or put a file of the same performance in its place with Replace with File.

On a take you recorded

A take recorded in Stab (an audio clip on an audio track) has no pins: they belong to recording lanes. Find the Beats on a take makes the song follow it instead: the take moves by less than half a bar so its first downbeat sits on a barline, and the song’s tempo changes bar by bar to match the downbeats heard, the tempo after it left as it was. It’s one undo step. Select the take (tap its waveform) and choose Find the Beats from the take’s menu (right-click it), the action bar or the Inspector’s Recording section. A take recorded to the click already follows the bars: the note then says so and changes nothing.

The meter it hears

Find the Beats also counts how many beats each bar has. Where that differs from the song’s time signature:

• A song with no notes yet takes the meter heard, and the note says so: “the song’s now in 3/4”.
• A song with notes keeps its own, and the note says what it heard. The lane’s menu then offers Find the Beats › Use 3/4 (as Heard) to change it.

Refining tapped pins

Pins you tapped in while listening are close but loose. Find the Beats › Refine Tapped Pins to the Beats moves each tapped pin onto the nearest beat heard, within about a tenth of a second, and leaves anchors where you put them. The note says how many moved, such as “Moved 30 of 32 tapped pins onto the beats”.

More accurate beats

Stab finds beats with its own tracker, quickly and on any device. For music where it struggles (a busy groove, a rumba, a classical guitar with no drums), the Beats model hears beats and bars more surely. When it isn’t installed, the Find the Beats submenu offers More Accurate: Get Beat This!…, which gets it from the Sound Library: see Model packs. Once it’s there, Find the Beats uses it by itself.

With the model, finding the beats takes a little while: the pill over the pane counts it out, “Finding the beats: 40 % · Stop”. Click it to stop, or choose Stop Analysis (⌘.)Stop Analysis (Ctrl+.)Stop Analysis (not on Web).