Beat-Sync Animation to a Song in Unreal Engine

When making visuals for pre-recorded content, you can use the audio file node to make the loudness of the music directly drive animation. This is quick and cheap, but oftent times the animation is a little bit muddy. You might be better off with note sequences where you can edit the timings precisely. If you go this route, you'll

want to sync your note sequence to your song inside of Sequencer. You can do this by hand if you have a perfect musical ear, or you can rely on some estimation tools to get you to a good starting place. Let's do this by hand first. For this to work, you can't just add music to your sequencer. You have to

specifically use an audio file node. Let's choose a song and let's sync this note sequence to the sequencer. So in this song, we have a few seconds of leading time. And then also partway through the song the BPM changes.

So currently our scrubbers are in sync between the note sequence and the level sequence, but the BPM doesn't match the actual music. And we have this lead in time here. So we can set this up manually. We can move the note sequence source time until the song actually starts. That way, when the song starts, our note

sequencer will start in sync. And if you know the BPM of your song, you can just punch it in. I'm not actually sure if that's the right BPM. To verify this, we can turn on the metronome and then listen to see if the metronome is on beat. Okay, so I've indeed remembered this

incorrectly. I think it was actually 142.5. Let's try that again.