Title: Synchronizing animation with a beat
Tags: animation;audio;timeline
Question: I want to make a music video for a techno song with a constant beat. I want to simulate strobe lights that flash in time with the beat (one set of lamps for the kicks, one for the snare etc).
Q what is the easiest, most efficient and most accurate way to do this? Bear in mind the song is several minutes long so doing it all by hand would be very time consuming. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty with programming (though I have not done that with Blender before). Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks
Comment: Do you have drum midi track?  Have a look at http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/47608/15543 If you  know what frequency range roundabouts of the drums you can drive from baked fcurves. Have some (very) test code for making fcurves (and hence animating) from drum midi tracks, that I could push to a branch.

Comment: It is pretty easy with animation nodes. Search for music driven animation nodes in google - there are some great tutorials


Here is another answer: In the current development of my own Blender AMV, I answered a similar question in another post. Have a look and see if this helps.
Tips for creating an animated music video?
Read through it before continuing to read this answer.
Once you map out your song with the drum beat and place it in Blender, you can scrub through your drum track and manually animate the lights. I know that you can keyframe their values, meaning you won't spend as much time animating each light.
And an idea to go with that is to copy and paste keyframes in the dope sheet. That will save you some time instead of manually keying each value.
Be aware that your framerate must match the beats per minute of your song, otherwise syncing will be off and you'll end up with a headache. To avoid this problem, determine the BPM of your song here. https://getsongbpm.com/tools/audio
Once you have the BPM, calculate the frames per beat here. https://www.vjamm.com/support_av_bpm.php%3Flang=en.html
Adjust the value of the framerate until the frames per beat is a whole number. Then you can adjust your framerate in Blender to match with the one shown when you determined your frames per beat.
From there, start animating!
Hope this helps!

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