Hello Friends, does ST3 have a tempo / BPM feature ? Thank you

You mean a click? No it does not because it does not know where in the file a beat is located. So even if you enter a tempo manually the click will most likely be out of sync sooner or later.

    No, more as a separate function for “track-less” times when I’m not singing with a track. Just acoustic and lyrics - no track.

      jzavaletta great idea, so you can simply choose your tempo and get a visual and audio feedback to perform freely but in perfect time.

        I will add to my todo list but it will not make it into version 3.6.

        So if I understand correctly the idea is that if you have a lyrics only song with a certain length and a bpm value set you should be able to have a audible and/or visible click?

          peter Here is my suggestion, keeping it as simple as possible for easy creation and easy user experiance.
          Every lyrics only song has no adio, but it has a selectable set time length, this is great, lyrics can be added and time synced, this is great,
          Now what would be nice is to have a standard click track set say at 120bpm which seems to be a standard setting with a lot of gear and this click to be a single sample sound without any accents as we dont need the complexity of bars recognition we just need a click, this then gives us the speed of the song by adjusting the audiable click, once the speed of the song has been determined say at 80bpm then you have a choice of either entering the synced timecode lyrics to this click track speed so lyrics scroll at that pace, or if you are running totally free of synced lyrisc you just dont enter timecode in each line you might enter it every end of page, the click track is always providing you audio feedback to the tempo you choose, this can be visually represented also by having the whole WAVEFORM area flash with the click, giving you a nice large visual area that might change colour to RED on the click.
          The reason i would not have the click have an accent to represent the first beat is you can easily change to any beat at any time and keep performing without any distraction, say you were doing a song in 4/4 you can easily continue with a song in 3/4 or 7/8 without any changes as long as you maintain the same speed.
          Every song should remember its click track settings and the adjustment of this should be available where pitch shift and speed is available except it would be Click Speed adjustment.
          This might have a volume of click sound where it can be turned off and a visual click only available and also the other way around.
          Perhaps a TAP button to be able to tap a speed of click this should represent a true tempo numeric value so it can be easily programed in with numeric values.
          The click feature to be available in Lyrics only and PDF mode where no audio is involved.
          It should be purely a simple feature that people that run in free mode no backing tracks just lyrics and perhaps PDFs without audio, this would be simple guide of the speed of their performance.
          When you select a lyrics only track, the audio click should imidiately operate at this songs pre determined tempo and the visual waveform should flash red colour on the beat so you can see you timing before you start then when you hit start the time gets activated and runs to the end you can pause the time but the Audio/Visual click is maintained you can start again and let the time stamps take you to the end , once the end is reached the next song is auto cued and the new Audio/ visual click is activated waiting for a start again, the reason for this is you always know what speed you are at the begining no matter if you have activated the start button to run to a timed scrolling.
          The click feature can be turned on or off for each song in the pop down window where all the other options are, and a global on off switch can be used to turn the overall feature on or off but no individual song click settings get affected .
          What do you think? Have i missed something, or perhaps i have triggered more ideas from you.
          Cheers Damir

            Damir
            Sound perfect! Basic and uncomplicated.
            Maybe a command like [click:on] or similar to select if to put it on/off for each song...

              rowe2000 yes this I mentioned, if you pull down the window that has pitch and speed, aha song properties, I remembered the actual name , in this window you can turn the feature on or off set it’s click volume level, set the tempo speed that matches all other standard midi devices, so if you know the tempo of a song you can enter it here and it will give you that tempo click track, if you want you can disable this feature just for this song, but in main settings you can enable or disable global settings and perhaps have choice of click sound ie rim , hats, click sound as options of click sound.
              This feature would be mainly used by free running performers that just need a click guide without being locked in to time signatures and still need lyrics with freedom to move at their pace, once looping gets introduced you could use the looping points to jump around the verses, choruses to get your lyrics yet have a click track running at all times not locking you to time so you could easily repeat the chorus 3 times and jump to the last verse with all lyrics jumping to correct position yet if you stay on the same spot by looping a loop point you can have your click track just working for you at all times even if you pause in a song the click is still working for you select verse 3 and hit play presto you are there and time kicks in and takes you to the end of song once you are on the ending if you hit pause you can create a 2 hour ending hit play it fully finishes selects the next song sets up all your devices , the click is active and flashing to the tempo of new song you can adlib your intros till the cows come home hit start as you actually need lyrics and let it take you home as preset or else start bouncing around using looping and pausing as needed the click is always there for you to keep you in the correct speed you chose in prep time, perhaps a foot pedal capability to tweak your click speed up or down so you can fine tune your performance on the run.

              This logic I am writing down as I think of it so it might have some flaws but the basic idea is there, now how to achieve this is Apples and Peters problem.
              I personally don’t run this way but if I was a brilliant guitarist and could get away with performing solo with guitar and vocals I would find this option very useful or something similar, I am assuming there are a shit load more better musicians out there then myself, that actually perform fully live and could use ST3 as a tool to help them specifically, at the moment it is aimed at backing tracks and Lyrics/chords/pdf not much thought for the talented musos that only need lyrics and run free Willy.

                Damir
                "yes this I mentioned" ..found it!
                "without being locked in to time signatures" That's just perfect!
                "once looping gets introduced" I'm really curious about how this could work out.. 🙂

                  peter Yessir. its a free-flowing concept when I want to just play acoustic and harmonica "live" but only need lyrics... the Metronome/BPM can be adjusted of course... so instead of playing a "track" which is 99% of the time, I will just load the song and hit "play" and the metronome/bpm will engage. And then I start playing ... Could be a part of the loop experiment... Cheers, And THANK YOU for an amazing app!

                  rowe2000 At the moment i am imagining it would work really simply and be a very useful assit tool to those that would use it. usually my ideas are pretty spot on but a lot of the times they get shot down or partly used to create something ok but not great and its because of the limitations of the opperating system , Peter is the only one that can say with reasonable certainty to what is possible as he is the one with the knowledge of the creativity tools given to him by Apple.
                  I am happy with ST3 and can us it on stage, it beats a lot of other similar software that had poor attempts to achieve this goal, but i would have done a number of things a little different to really simplify its user experiance even more but since there are operating system restrictions you can only do with what tools you got, and Peter has done Plenty so we cant complain.
                  I am excited to see how looping will be implemented, i hope he can make it really simple yet powerfull on stage and easy to program, this is a really big ask but if he delivers hel be the first as i dont know of any software that does what ST3 does as is, not to mention having looping.

                  I will get back to this thread and see how to integrate it best when I start working on this feature. But it will definitely not make it into version 3.6.

                    peter TY! I was thinking it could be bundled with the "loop" feature since they may rely on each other... TY for everything you do.... JZ

                    a year later

                    I have started working on this feature for version 3.8. So what will be possible is a visual metronome. Not in the waveform view as suggested because that is already too crowded and constant flashing interferes with the region highlighting. That is confusing as hell.

                    What works well is to flash a colored border around the lyrics/pdf view. That's very easy to see and does not interfere with other important information.

                    Each song already has a bpm field. I will add a switch to song details that enables the metronome for a song no matter what type of song. I don't see a reason why there should be a separate metronome tempo field.

                    Regarding audio: That's unfortunately not possible in the 3.x versions. The current audio engine is not able to play samples at predefined time intervals. And I can not generate a click track on the fly when a song is loaded. There are many more challenges implementing the audio part (like different sounds which might have copyrights , volume settings, audio routing, ...) which is simply too much for this update as I don't want to rebuild the audio engine to make this possible. But I will consider this for the audio engine in version 4 which will be built from the ground up.

                      Hi Peter, the visual metronome idea sounds great , I have some questions and suggestions , will you have it so it is active as soon as you select a song without playing the song so it gives you an idea of what is to come before you start?
                      If so, will you have a way to find the tempo of every song so you can enter it in to the tempo setting of each song.
                      Like, tap along with the playing song and it works out the tempo and then allows you to use this tempo in the song tempo setting?
                      That way everything can be done in ST3 itself without using external apps.
                      Suggestion , a tap button next to song tempo setting so you simply play the song and tap on the side button that gives you a tempo reading that then is put in to the tempo setting of song, and once it is in there the visual tempo reacts to this settings if it’s enabled in settings.
                      Another suggestion is to have the capability to turn off the highlighted beat one so you can choose first beat highlight on or off.
                      This would be very helpful and simple to use for obvious reasons, in my case I won’t have to program the very time consuming sections of songs with no audio as i don’t use a click track because I use the audio I hear and the visual programming I do in lyrics, so this would then make it even simpler to finish a backing track.
                      Just thinking as I write, it would be handy to keep the metronome going even when you stop so you can addlib with it and it resets itself to the new audio section loop start
                      Cheers Damir

                        Damir why would you need a tap button if it’s already set to the bpm of the song? At least that’s how I read what Peter was saying it’d work.

                          Lishy why would you need a tap button if it’s already set to the bpm of the song? At least that’s how I read what Peter was saying it’d work.

                          It would be great if ST3 could automatically recognise the tempo of every song and know it in settings, but I don’t believe that’s what will happen as it’s probably asking too much of the technology available, I believe if you load a song in without it having a tempo figure already programmed you will have to enter the tempo setting manually so my suggestion is to be able to simply work out the average tempo you have a function so you can find this tempo without having to go back to a DAW to find it .
                          Not all audio that gets loaded in to ST3 will have tempo information.
                          I believe without this information the visual metronome will not work accurately.
                          I am just pointing things out without knowing what Peter is actually doing and hopefully end up with something we can actually use with ease and purpose.
                          If it’s added but doesn’t do much for us then it’s just adding more complexity to ST3 , I am sure Peter is on the ball because he’s a musician but there’s no harm in bouncing ideas around.