Questions & Answers

Snap to Markers

+4 votes
1,311 views
asked Oct 28, 2022 in Editing by princeagrawal (13,910 points)
edited Nov 20, 2022 by princeagrawal

Studio One has a lot of Snap to options like Snap to events, zero crossings, cursor, loop......but not to markers.

This feature could be particularly very useful while scoring to video and while syncing out of sync recorded tracks. Here are some proposed workflows that would really benefit from having this feature : 

Workflow Example 01  - You have imported the video on the video track and have set the marker track with timebase to seconds, where you will add markers to important things happening in the video (on a per frame basis). Now you open the tempo track and add tempo points on starting of the bar located nearest to those markers you set earlier to the video (typically during a spotting session). So you try to drag these tempo points (that you have set to a bar start) and try to make them snap them to the markers (which are synced to imp situations/frames in the video), so that you can have each idea/motif at the starting of a bar and so that your music perfectly aligns with the grid and tempo changes in the tempo track. But since there is no option in Studio One currently to enable snapping to markers, doing this entire task is a freaking nightmare. The way I currently do this is by enabling "Snap to Frames" and zooming in way down to individual frame level in timeline and then manually dragging each tempo point to the desired frame, which is extremely annoying. 

To see what i mean in action, check out the following video. It shows this exact workflow and also shows how Cubase can do this like a piece of cake. but for some reason, it is impossible to do in S1. [To see this workflow and why this feature is an absolute necessity watch the full video. To just see how snapping to markers work, watch at 10:09]

Workflow Example 02 - I have recorded a session with a guitar, drum, bass and vocal track which is free human performance and not strictly adhering to a fixed tempo. It has all kinds of swings and tempo changes and I want to keep it that way and not have everything align with a fixed tempo click track as that would make it sound less human and a bit robotic. But like every human performance, the guitar, bass, vocals and drums are very slightly out of sync with each other. So to fix this I import the drums, guitar, bass and vocals on 4 audio tracks in S1, then press play. While listening to this 4 track mix I drop markers (with Y key on keyboard) during realtime playback at points on drum beat (drum being the best reference for dropping markers) where the 4 tracks loose their sync. My plan is to add bend markers to the Guitar, vocal and bass tracks at the out sync points and make the bend markers on these tracks Snap to the Markers i dropped during realtime playback. That should fix the sync issues. But since there isn't a snap to markers feature in S1 yet, doing this is super tricky. 

These are just the examples of situations that I often run into and it makes me go "This wouldn't be a problem if I could just Snap to Markers in S1". But I m sure there are countless other workflow improvements that would happen if this feature is added to S1.

It would be so useful if this feature is added into the future updates of S1. It is so desperately needed.

Thanks for reading this and consider upvoting it if you think this feature would be a useful addition to S1. 

1 Answer

+1 vote
answered Oct 30, 2022 by simonthompson (790 points)
I'm with you on this one - and an overall retooling of the entire "snap" suite. I have a similar post asking to allow you to toggle the various snap options via macros. I'd appreciate it if you could chuck a thumb that way too   

https://answers.presonus.com/59905/select-macro-toolbar-pages-via-command
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