CODEWITHSUNDEEP
audiokit
Steve Landey
Steve Landey

Reputation: 2609

AudioKit metronome synced with time-pitched audio loops

I'm making an app that plays synced audio loops with a metronome. For example, I might have 3 files like this:

And a metronome sound tick.m4a, which I play with AKSamplerMetronome.

I need to play them back at arbitrary tempos, so I use AKTimePitcher on the AKAudioFiles (so playing at 90bpm, I'd play bass_60bpm.m4a at 1.5x).

This almost works, but after 3-5 loops, the metronome gets out of sync with the audio loops. I think I understand why that happens (audio_sample_length * floating_point_number is not equivalent to AKSamplerMetronome's tempo calculations), but I don't know how to fix it.

What I suspect I need to do is manually reimplement some or all of AKSamplerMetronome, but play the metronome ticks based on AKTimePitcher's output, but I can't piece together enough info from the API, docs, and examples to make it happen.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 377

Answers (1)

c_booth
c_booth

Reputation: 2225

An alternate approach might be to use AKSequencer instead of AKSamplerMetronome. The midi output of the sequencer's track could be sent to an AKCallbackInstrument, and the sequencer's events could get the callback function to trigger both the time-stretched sample and the metronome ticks (and you could also trigger synchronized UI events from there as a bonus). This would guarantee that they stay in sync.

Apple's MusicSequence, which is what AKSequencer uses under the hood, is a little flakey with its timing immediately after you call play, but it's pretty solid after that. If you start the sequencer just before its looping point (i.e., if you have a 1 bar loop, start it one sixteenth note before the end of the first bar) then you can get passed that flakiness before the actual loop starts.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions