Metronome
OOM's metronome can be found in the Views > Tempo Editor > Metronome. The metronome icon is part of the transport toolbar, which means you can click the metronome on or off in the Composer, Performer, or Transport Bar.
The shortcut to bring up the metronome dialog is CTRL + M (Press ESC to close the window)
This page contains the following sections:
- Metronome
- Precount
The window is separated into 2 parts, Metronome and Precount. To save any settings you make, press Apply at the bottom of the panel, then Ok to close the dialog. To ignore the settings you've just made, press Cancel.
The toggle on/off shortcut is C, and is global.
OOM's metronome can be used as an audio beep, or midi port/channel to a sound source, for example, a woodblock sound in a LinuxSampler channel.
To enable the audio beep, check the box at the top left of the metronome panel. You'll need to route the audio somewhere, and to the right of the check-box is a dropdown menu called Choose Outputs... , which shows the MASTER output by default. The OOM metronome is routed outside of the mute or solo system, so the audio beep, if MASTER is selected as the output, will sound all the time the metronome is enabled, and no matter what state the rest of the tracks and busses are set to. Under those settings is a volume slider, which you can adjust to suit your own requirements.
If you choose to hear a midi driven metronome, then you'll need to route the midi signal out to a midi driven sound source, and route the audio from that sound source into OOM, or alternatively, directly to your playback outputs in JACK, or possibly ALSA. (This may be useful if you have your headphones output from a hardware mixer, for example)
To enable the midi click, uncheck the audio beep check-box, and check the midi click check-box. There are individual bar (measure) and beat settings for midi, including velocity adjustment for each, and midi output channel and port settings. Note that the port value is a number, and you'll need to open the connections manager/midi port tab (F2), and check which number corresponds to the midi port device you want to output to.
The Precount panel comprises additional settings to further refine the metronome playback.
To use these setttings, enable the precount functions, by checking the box at the top left of the Precount panel, called enable . Under the checkbox is a spinbox, in which the user can set the number of bars the metronome will sound, before playback commences. This is highly useful for recording, as you get a chance to ready yourself before recording starts, and have a notion of the tempo you want to play at. By default, the OOM precount will "read" those 2 bars from the Mastertrack editor, if it's enabled. So, for example, if you've "written" any tempo changes into the mastertrack editor, say a curve of gradually increasing tempo up to the point you want to record at, then the metronome will faithfully click in time to the changes. To get a static tempo for your precount click, uncheck mastertrack.
Below that is Key Signature. It's here that you can set your metronome click to sound in combinations of bar and beat sounds according to the key signature you set.
At the bottom of the panel are two checkboxes, PreRecord, and PreRoll.
When Prerecord is checked, you'll hear the metronome click for the number of precount bars when you enable global record, and commence recording.
When Preroll is checked you'll hear the metronome click for the number of precount bars during playback.