The preference menu is accessible by mouse hovering the top area.

Quickstart

This is a quick rundown of how Pulse works to help newbies get up to speed.

General

The General preferences gives you options to keep Pulse on top of other windows or not. Here you can also change the color that Pulse uses to show it’s confident that it has found the correct BPM. This is mostly for people with color vision deficiency, but it’s also just fun to change the brand colors to whatever you feel like today. Because f our designer what does he know anyway.

Audio

The most important setting to get Pulse up and running is the input.

Pulse works with any incoming audio signal, but as you can probably imagine, the cleaner the signal, the easier it is for Pulse to analyze it. A dedicated line input from an external audio source connected to your audio interface works best. So become friends with the audio engineer, bring him a drink, ask friendly for a line and you should be good to go.

If that’s not possible, don’t worry, most laptop mics work surprisingly well, but your mileage may vary depending on the quality of your on-board microphone.

A note to audio heads. Contrary to what you may expect, Pulse works better with a larger buffer size. I know that low latency is the mantra, but with a higher buffer, Pulse can analyze a larger sample range and it will give more accurate results. It then automatically compensates for the larger delay. So really, 512 or even 1024 is fine. Trust me. You don’t need ASIO.

Link

The Link tab shows you the status of the Link connection, as well the number of apps currently connected. You can also toggle Link on and off here, to help troubleshoot any issues.

Latency Compensation

This is also where you set the ever important Latency Compensation.

There are some situations in which you want the target application to be before or behind the tracked beat.

For example, when all of your software works as expected, Pulse and your VJ-software will run correctly in sync with the incoming music. On your computer screen, the visuals are then nicely in time with the music. But on the screen on stage, the visuals may lag behind.

This situation usually occurs when your video signal runs through a lot of video hardware (notably mixers and LED controllers), all introducing latency.

You can use the Latency Compensation setting to offset the output timeline of Pulse, so that it runs before or behind the audio time. Note, this does not affect Pulse’s own metronome or visual pulse, it only affects the clock it sends out, so you will notice the difference only in your host application.

In the typical scenario described above where the video on stage is behind the music, you will want to set Latency Compensation to a negative value in order to make the Link output ahead of time.

Latency Compensation is measured in milliseconds, so a value of 200 means it’s compensating by 0.2 seconds.

MIDI

The MIDI tab allows you to set MIDI shortcuts for Tap and Resync.

MIDI Input

To assign MIDI shortcuts, first enable your MIDI controller via the MIDI Input Device dropdown. Then press the Learn… button for Tap. It will turn red and you can hit the button on your controller that you want to assign to Tap. Then repeat the process for Resync.

To change the assigned shortcut, simply click the button again and ‘relearn’ the new shortcut. To remove a shortcut altogether, click the button and press backspace, escape or delete.

A note for Windows users: until Microsoft gets its shit together, it is not possible to open a MIDI device for two applications at the same time. If you want to use the same controller for both Pulse and your main application, you will need to somehow split the MIDI signal. Two off the shelf solutions for this are Bome and MidiSplit. If you prefer a free solution, using LoopBE to create a little loop is pretty ghetto but totally works. You could even still use feedback from Pulse if you really wanted to.

MIDI Output

If you have one of them fancy controllers that has pretty colors on the buttons, you can also enable MIDI feedback. First enable your controller as an output via the MIDI Output Device dropdown. The ON and OFF Feedback values will now control the color of the button when pressed and released. Just use the + and – buttons to cycle through the velocity values, or enter the value you want directly in the value box. Pulse will immediately show the color on the controller itself, so you can easily pick the one you like. When feedback is enabled, Pulse will always flash the Tap button in time with the current beat.

MIDI Clock

If you’re really into hardware or just like ancient protocols, Pulse can also output MIDI Clock. If you’re into that stuff, I don’t need to tell you about virtual ports and how crap MIDI Clock actually is, because you already know all about all that.

Registration

Here you can register or remove your registration from this computer. You also see the days you have left before Pulse needs to phone home to check if everything is still peachy.

Update

Here you can see the version you’re running, as well as check if there are any new versions available online.