Finding the BPM with Adobe Audition 3???

I don’t know what is in Audition 3 as I have been comfortable with Audition 1.5 and have had no reason to switch. In 1.5 (and I’m guessing 3.0) there is no automatic BPM tool. You really gotta count it out yourself or use a third party bpm detection software (aka mixmeister) and then bring the bpm in to audition. No BPM Detector is fool proof so I’d suggest just counting out four bars and looping it, when it sounds smooth go to session properties and extract four bars to get whatever BPM it says. Usually mine will be like 92.12 and I’ll just round down to 92, although some producers will have a BPM of like 89.66 so be careful assuming.

Another tool with audition in edit view (I’m assuming they didn’t downgrade from 1.5 to 3) you can click View-> Spectral View which gives you a spectral view (obviously) of frequencies and provides more guidance as to beats than waveform view. There are usually pretty clear cut lines that you can go by and do what I said earlier, find a 2 or 4 bar loop that sounds smooth an extract it to get bpm. Then check the song a minute or two down and if its still on beat you know you hit it. I prefer this complete beatmapping, especially b/c BPM doesn’t tell you when teh first beat starts, the offset time, which beatmapping will do for you. The spectral view can be a huge time saver (and I believe it is what the auto-bpm programs use to detect beat, not sure though). Try that out, in 1.5 it is only in edit view but you just click View–>Spectral View (instead of Waveform view).

Hope that helped, or better yet, hope it made any sense. That is how I get BPM’s unless I just get a rock solid BPM number already on the song or from a database. But even some databases or a Auto-Detect BPM can lead you off by a couple beats per minute, which makes a HUGE difference. I always like to check but it is more time consuming. But definitely take a look at spectral view in audition.