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and here you have people pissing on BPM counters, sheeeesh!

Then you should kick the musician's ass. :)

Gloom is right - a good musician SHOULD be able to make music according to the design - but this is where catch 23 comes into play: often, there IS no design... but that's a tooootally different ball game... ;)

I see no trouble with using a specialized midi version for syncing.

willbe : who would dare to do that to a musician :)

i tend to like to use bpm based syncing so that for every 16 imaginary beats (think of the soundtrack as house, even if it's d'n'b or something else) the timer smoothly moves up by 1 so that at the beginning of the 1st "pattern" the timer is 0, half way up the pattern it's 0.5, after the 1st pattern it's 1, halfway to the 2nd pattern it's 1.5 etc.. This is good for syncing the 'major' parts of a demo (bigger effects) etc. This whole mindset goes back to tracker days, but is applicable to most 'normal' electronic music even nowadays... I also tend to use basic level data from fmod for small alterations here and there, plus pre-analyzed "per-channel" (or, well, drums, lead, bassline, effects) audio for other random things. My best friend is "strobe = 1-fmod(t*16,1);" :-)

Milliseconds i avoid like cancer.

totally how i like it too.

It's how i do it too. For more complex beats you can always stick in a pattern that triggers effects, and set the duration to 1 beat so it ties in to the bpm timer.

The only "hard part" doing it that way is finding out the BPM in the first place.. if you're lucky you can just ask the musician, if you're not it's a real bitch. I've tried BPM counters and such with pretty limited success, best technique i've found so far is to count say 100 beats and time it. Which is really hard if the beat stops for a while, or there's some 'slow down' type effect in the music.

skrebbel: I found what iq said about the synch-technique used in kindercrasher