The preference menu is accessible by mouse hovering the top area where you can configure the audio settings.

Input

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.

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.

Using latency compensation

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.