# Beat Finder

From Audacity Development Manual

Beat Finder attempts to place labels at beats which are much louder than the surrounding audio. It's a fairly rough and ready tool, and will not necessarily work well on a typical modern pop music track with compressed dynamic range.

If you already have a label track and that is included in the selection that you make for the analysis then these labels will be added to your selected label track - possibly causing confusion with your existing labels.

- Workaround: Ensure you just select audio track(s) and include no label track in the selection for the analysis. Audacity will then create a new label track for the analysis output named "Label Track" - you may wish to rename that so that you remember what the labels in the analysis track refer to.

  Accessed by: Analyze > Beat Finder...

## Threshold Percentage

Sets the beat detection threshold. The default setting is 65%. The setting can be changed by typing directly into the box or by using the slider.

If you do not get enough beats detected, try reducing the "Threshold Percentage" setting.

## Buttons

Clicking on the command buttons give the following results:

- Manage gives a dropdown menu enabling you to manage presets for the tool and to see some detail about the tool. For details see Manage presets
- Debug applies the effect to the selected audio with the current effect settings, but unlike OK the effect runs in debug mode. This is primarily of use when writing or editing Nyquist plug-ins.
  - In addition to the normal plug-in behavior, a "debug window" opens to display error messages, normally the debug window will be empty
- OK applies the effect to the selected audio with the current effect settings and closes the dialog
- Cancel aborts the effect and leaves the audio unchanged, closing the dialog
- brings you to the appropriate page in the Manual, this page

## Links

|< Index of Effects, Generators and Analyzers

|< Analyze Menu