Frequently asked questions

No. Anyone can use Synchrony. There is no need to create a score with notation software.

Synchrony works from two inputs: your expressive performance (the freely-played take whose timing you want to keep) and a reference that gives it a known structure to align against.

The reference is either a recording of music played by performers and instruments, or music you have generated digitally. It will frequently be a quantized version of your performance, something that has already been mathematically snapped to a grid, or a version of your music that you have recorded to a standard click track.

Synchrony then uses something we call ‘score-performance matching’ to perform an analysis. After that you can easily guide the software to create a sound, with control over all the elements of tempo and tone, in minutes rather than hours.

It creates a tempo map from a performance by aligning it to a reference score or MIDI file. The resulting tempo track can be imported into a DAW so the session follows the performance timing instead of a fixed grid.

In many cases, yes. Instead of forcing notes onto a grid, it extracts timing from the performance and applies it to the session. This keeps expressive timing intact while still maintaining structural alignment.

Yes. The note-by-note alignment system is designed to work with dense passages, tempo changes, and irregular phrasing, making it suitable for orchestral and film scoring workflows.

Logic’s Smart Tempo and Pro Tools’ Beat Detective detect tempo blind from the audio. They infer the beat without knowing what was played. That works on steady, clearly-accented material, but tends to struggle with the expressive, rubato playing where you most need the help. (Beat Detective is transient-based, so sustained and freely-timed passages give it little to lock onto.)

Synchrony is score-informed. Because it aligns your performance to a known score, it turns an error-prone guessing problem into a precise alignment one, so it holds up on dense, rubato and orchestral material. It also works symbolically, on your MIDI performance, producing an editable tempo map rather than warping audio.

Yes, it’s a core use case. Synchrony turns a freely-played performance into a tempo map. Import that into your DAW and the metronome clicks in time with your expressive timing instead of a fixed BPM. That gives session players a click that breathes with the music, so they can overdub onto a rubato performance and stay in sync, exactly the workflow in the string-quintet case study.

It works as both. Synchrony is available as a VST3, AU and CLAP plug-in, as well as a standalone application, so it integrates into your DAW or runs as part of an independent workflow.

They share the same core, but differ in how sound and MIDI are handled.

Standalone is self-contained. It hosts your own instrument plug-ins (scan your installed instruments and load one to audition the score and performance) and uses its own audio device, set in Audio/MIDI Settings. It needs no DAW.

The plug-in (VST3, AU or CLAP) runs inside your DAW and streams MIDI directly to and from it, so the DAW’s instruments and routing handle playback. That is the tighter integration you would expect, with no separate audio setup or plug-in scanning to manage.

The plug-in runs in any DAW that supports VST3, AU or CLAP, including Cubase, Nuendo, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Studio One and Reaper. We don’t currently ship an AAX version, so it doesn’t run as a plug-in inside Pro Tools.

You can still use Synchrony’s output in any DAW, Pro Tools included. Run it standalone (or as a plug-in in a supported DAW), then bring the tempo map, or a rendered click and stems, into your session, exactly as in the string-quintet case study. How tempo maps import depends on each DAW’s own tempo workflow.

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When exporting MIDI from Ableton and Studio One, tempo information is not written to the files. This is easy to fix by using the global tempo slider, which is clearly displayed, to set the correct tempo.

Not yet, but stay tuned. We plan to add this feature in v2.