On a remix of one of the songs off the Seals and Crofts album "Traces," we decided to experiment with the groove in the middle of a song (We May Never Pass This Way Again) to something Jim Seals had wanted to try for some time. Had I not had the Beat Detection Engine, it would have taken untold hours to change a straight 4/4 to something closer to a New Orleans Shuffle (40+tracks!).

As the track had been recorded to a click (with excellent musicians), I quickly analyzed (using default settings!) the Drums and Bass tracks, experimented with different groove quantizations—tweaking until I had what I wanted—then applied this "tempo map" to the entire section! Midi as well as audio now had this custom groove! I don't know how it is done, but the time stretching that had to be performed on beats within the soundbites is totally transparent!! Also I did not lose the transient response! I can create a groove and apply it to MIDI and Audio together...amazing.

I'm now working on a DVD project recorded originally in Pro Tools for a new country artist, Chris Blair. He wanted to redo a few things, but since the DVD had already been edited (completed) did not know how much trouble it would be. I dumped the Pro Tools session tracks into DP 4.5, imported the "mixed" 2 track DVD, used the Quickscribe film cues view to make a map of the audio edits, and then matched the multi track with the 2 track. After getting the cue track together I decided to go for a 5.1 surround mix since this is footage of a live concert.

The fun began... I used the new surround sends feature to place certain events—ike a particular cheer in the crowd—to a special location in the surround field (all automated, of course). By the way, the default audio edits to the original 20 track master I performed earlier did not need "refining"—seriously smooth. The rest was fun and games! I've got QuickTime DV playback, scrolling 20+ tracks, moving beats, adding parts, and some serious plug-ins (with no worry of latency, thanks to automatic plug in latency compensation). I was able to make this project come off with all the features of one with a much, much larger budget.

Another artist in preproduction with me is Zach Liff. Zach is a perfectionist with his music and is fanatical about song tempos (as well he should be). I asked Zach to play his guitar (no click) and sing his songs into Digital Performer several times. I then analyzed the tempos and got an average for each song with the Beat Detection Engine, so that I could then take the averages from the several performances to establish his "correct" tempo for each song. A serious time saver. I could even make rubato sections have bar lines that were correctly aligned with the audio—with ease.