How to stretch / quantize an unstable midi mix?

[bitley]

I've successfully synchronized many tracks manually to the beat - with stretch disabled, including my Scritti remix which is quite popular on YouTube.

But this time I'd like to add overdubs to a MIDI composition I did in the early 1990s and unfortunately I used gear which simply could not play in time. This includes the Kawai K4 but mainly the Boss DR-550. If I could travel in time I'd sync it with Midi clock and it would have shuffled nicely. Sadly I used it as a tone module instead which meant that when MIDI traffic went too dense it just couldn't play its sounds where it was supposed to.

The track is by all means quite fine to listen to but as soon as I zoom in on it the inconsistency becomes very apparent.

What I'd like to do is to import it stretch it and quantize it, but I have no success here. Am I supposed to have Reason set to 120 BPM - the default BPM? I've found the exact tempo to be 113.328 BPM but even then, importing the audio all over again it still decides to stretch to something completely different. In my mind I felt that if I had Reason set to a specific tempo the audio would not be stretched in any way until I increased or decreased the tempo.

But perhaps I've forgotten something.

Anyway audio quantizing an entire mix renders a quite ugly sound but I think I can kind of live with that and go from there by masking it with lots of overdubs etc. I just want the music to play back in a clockwerk perfect sync, lol.

Help me save the track

[Loque]

The stretching behaves often weird and doesn't seem to follow your changes...

Try a different algorithm.

[bitley]

Hmm, yes, why not. I'd appreciate a longer reply if anyone has been toying with this stuff.

[eusti]

I'm a bit confused about the setup... We are talking about audio tracks, yes? Audio multi tracks of MIDI triggered sound modules?
In any case: You could open Reason, don't mess with the BPM and drop your audio files in there. Then select them and (mac) control + click on them to select disable stretch. Then set your desired BPM. The audio should not change. Most likely you will need to fine tune by control + clicking again if you want to select the stretch algorithm (either "Vocal", "Melody" or "Allround")... Different settings might work better on different source material. Most likely you'll need to cut the audio into pieces and move stuff into the proper place by hand (which won't change the audio) or do serious work with the slice edit function... Even then you'll probably need to re-edit the hit points to make sure everything sits properly on the beat...

Hope this helps.

D.

[bitley]

Thanks for the reply – it's a stereo track re-recorded from tape. There must be a better way to loctite™ to the beat. Haven't had ReCycle installed for quite some time, perhaps that might be useful here.

[Sterioevo]

You need to make sure the BPM is the same as the audio file you are importing.

No magic quantise button I m aware of.
Manually in slice edit mode would be my approach. I would play a loop to a click and move through the track and adjust.

There are tutorial videos made by Ryan with an alternative approach.

Personally I prefer Ableton as my usual scenario is a multi track band recording that I want to quantise (edit) to the grid so I can add synced material.

[bitley]

Again I did this remix - with a complete reordering & so on of many parts / so I know how to sync up audio pretty well

Original below

But audio with glitches in the stability is a tad worse.