17. Listening tools

Sync pins

A band rarely plays to a click: its tempo breathes, speeds up in the chorus, slows at the end. A sync pin ties a beat of the song to a moment of a recording. With a few pins, or one on every beat, the song’s bars follow the performance, so your parts, the loop and the playhead stay with the recording all the way through.

Sync pins

Available on every platform.

What a pin shows

A pin is a notch on the ruler’s lower edge (its beat) joined by a hairline to a dot on the recording’s lane (its moment). A pin on a bar is larger than one on a beat; zoomed out, the beats’ pins hide and the bars’ stay. A solid dot is an anchor, exact where it was put; a hollow dot is a tap, placed as you played and smoothed with its neighbours.

Point at a pin to see what it ties: the bar and beat, and the moment in the recording, such as 9.1 ↔ 0:17.204.

Placing pins

• Find the Beats places them for you, on every beat or every bar: see Find the Beats.
• Tap them in while the song plays: press ⌥MAlt+M on each bar’s first beat as you hear it. The first tap pins the caret’s bar, each next one the bar after. Hold ⇧ as well to pin the next beat instead of the next bar.
• Pin the caret: pause where you hear a beat, put the caret on that beat of the song, then press the same key, or choose Pin the Caret to the Recording from the Transport menu. The beat is pinned to the moment where the playhead paused, as an anchor.

Each pin is an undo step; Find the Beats’ pins are one step together.

Adjusting pins

• Drag a pin’s dot along the lane to move its moment. A tap moved by hand becomes an anchor.
• Drag a pin’s notch on the ruler to tie it to another beat; it snaps to the beats.
• Double-click a pin’s dot to switch it between anchor and tap.
• Drag the waveform of a recording that has pins to slide every pin together, when the whole recording sits a little early or late.
• Right-click a pin for its menu: Anchor (exact), Tap (smoothed), Delete Pin and Delete All Pins.

While you drag a pin, a video shows the pin’s moment in the Video pane, so you can line up what you see with its beat.

Who leads

A song with a pinned recording plays one of two ways, chosen in the recording lane’s menu:

• Recording Leads: the recording plays as it was recorded, and the song’s tempo bends to the pins. Between two pins the tempo is exactly those beats in those seconds; before the first and after the last, the nearest stretch’s tempo carries on. A single pin only shifts the song onto it.
• Tab Leads: the song keeps its own tempo, and the recording is stretched onto it through the pins, its pitch kept.

A pill after the recording’s tag (its name and M, over the start of its waveform) says which: Leads or Follows song; click it to switch. A YouTube video always leads: its sound can’t be stretched.

While a recording leads, the tempo chip in the pane’s corner reads ♩ ≈ and the tempo at the caret, and the ruler shows the tempo the pins make, a bar at a time, where it moves by 2 BPM or more. The chip’s menu has The Recording Leads (its tempo) and The Song Leads (the recording is stretched). A song’s tempo can’t be typed while a recording leads: its pins set it.

Only one recording leads a song: the first with pins (a YouTube video before a file). Others with pins follow the song, each stretched onto it through its own pins.

Delete All Pins, in the lane’s menu, removes the recording’s pins in one step.