The YouTube synchronization on Hookpad is crazy frustrating

I have experienced this with a couple of my transcriptions as I’m sure many others have as well. The YouTube video and the transcription (which, by the way, actually matches to the actual tempo of the song thanks to a tempo tapper) do not correlate, especially when I try to add tempo changes to the transcription, which only affects the actual transcription and not the synchronization. When I try to shift the start and end of the synchronization markers, the problem persists.

It’s no wonder why I have seen tabs on this website where the YouTube video visibly makes zero attempt to match with the transcription: the user gave up, because it’s infuriating how it’s the YouTube video that controls the tempo, not the person controlling the tempo.

This needs to be fixed ASAP.

1 Like

Every day I’m seeing countless people on the street that are utterly incapable of properly operating a car, but that never even once led me to question the legitimacy of the car as a means of transportation.

Just because there are some people who are incapable of making proper use of a particular tool, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the tool itself.

That being said, there should probably be an updated tutorial video on how to properly sync a tab to a youtube video as there seems to be a considerable amount of people on here who don’t seem to get it.

1 Like

I think that it applies moreso toward songs with tempo changes than the average song. You can look at my first couple of tabs wherein there were no tempo changes and therefore no issues with synchronization.

1 Like

Also, time changes which sync with the YouTube video do not necessarily correlate with the actual song, because sometimes the varying tempo makes the transcription sound wonky and wrong.

Please feel free to correct me if this is wrong, but I think this is caused by how this version of Hookpad handles tempo: a start and end point is set by the user for the sync, and the number of bars is then set by dragging the two colorful vertical bar things. Based on this, Hookpad calculates the BPM once, unless a manual tempo change is inserted. You can do this by clicking on the bar in question where the tempo is changing.

The problem starts with the individual tempo changes. They seem to throw everything off when there are too many.

I think the issue is that you are trying to change the tempo of a few individual measures until a portion of the Tab is in sync, but that’s not how it works.

You need to determine the actual BPM for every single measure and the Tab will only be in sync once you’ve entered all of them, so checking for results during this process is absolutely pointless.

Determining the tempo of an individual measure with a tapper will easily lead to imprecise results and only works if the tempo is constant during that measure. If the tempo changes during that measure, you need to determine the BPM that corresponds to the duration of the measure, which I find is easiest using a DAW.

No, actually I have been doing individual measures, not groups of them. And I have been checking the tempo of each measure.

Syncing the tempo of a project with tempo changes is hard, I agree. As the total amount of seconds of the part will stay the same regardless of your selected tempos, changing a tempo after bar four will also affect the tempo from bars one to four. So basically all that counts are the amount of percentages the new tempo is slower or faster. If there are more tempo changes involved it’s even more complicated.

I also think that there still might be some sync bugs involved but I didn’t have the time yet to check this.

Regards!
Dennis

2 Likes

Another song, another synchronization problem. It’s the same issue as before: the YouTube marker is not matching with the tempo that I set. It goes either too quickly or too slowly. It’s frustrating.