ThumbJam Forum

Hello, I'm a new user to Thumbjam, but have run into something I cannot find a fix for. I have a 30 bar song, 1:28 in length, with a tempo of a tempo of 72bmp. When I paste this in Thumbjam, it consistently changes the tempo to 86bmp, making my loops off. Anyone else run into this problem?

Thanks

Just to clarify, what is the source of the 30 bar song? Are you pasting it in from another app as a single WAV file? Is it in 4/4? Any other details you can think of?

Hi Jesse,
Thank you for your quick reply. The source is Sonoma FourTrack using the wireworks audio copy/paste. It is a single stereo WAV file in 4/4 time, recorded to a click at 72BPM in Fourtrack.

Perhaps I should also add that it is not a loop, but a 30 bar clip to be played once. I'm pasting it into Thumbjam to record a few instruments over top.

Thanks again and really great work.

I think the tempo is derived from the audio file length, assuming that the number of bars is a power of two and the meter is 4/4

16 or 32 bars would work but not 30

that said, i tend to import a click track as well and that way I don't need to worry about what tempo tj thinks its working with

TJ's auto-bpm calculation has to make some assumptions, one of those being that the number of bars is a power of two.... whether this is wise or not is up in the air. That said, given the numbers you gave I would expect TJ to guess 87.3 as the bpm. Also, the numbers you gave don't even compute knowing that it is 30 4/4 bars long with a tempo of 72, and a length of 1:28 (88 seconds). That's 120 beats / 1.466m = 81.8 bpm. So I'm not sure if 4Track is just giving you some extra/missing time or what. Either way, the solution is probably to do as Casey suggested and import a click track loop exactly the length of a single bar to go along with it and use that instead.

Obviously the loop-only nature of TJ is going to give you some trouble if you just want to add a part here and there. Hopefully future versions will give you some alternatives.

Thanks for your replies guys. I'll check the exact length. Perhaps what I will do in the future is import a one bar click made in DrumTrack and overdub from there.

Adding parts here and there is really why I got the app, since most of the instruments I'm recording on the iphone are live. My workaround so far has been to ThumbJam parts in solo and then paste them into FourTrack at the correct measure, mixing in with the rest of the tune. I'd be interested in hearing how other people approach a similar situation.

I love the program and look forward to future releases.

Thanks again for your help Jesse and Casey.

The tempo is kind of always wrong when I import things into ThumbJam, the other apps I'm using are probably not that well fitted to create something that would work with well cut loops (I import from Ampkit mostly...). My workaround is usually just the same as yours: I use the imported 'loop' as a background track and then export what I record in TJ to Fourtrack, Monle or Multitrack DAW... The click track is a very good idea (one I never had) but I thought that, as the imported music sounding part is not well cut, the track I really want in would still be badly fitted to the looping system. I'll test some stuf and see how it works...
Thanks CaseyJames and Jazzbrother, nice thread and suggestions.

Jesse, any idea of the new version's ETA ?(from what I read from you this last week I'm starting to really want to be impatient to see and try that one!)

I've had good luck (with the latest version) importing a loop from DrumTrack8. TJ gets the tempo right.

I did notice the metronome's BPM control changed to a wierd value once, but eventually it came back, and I don't really use the metronome anyway.