After adding a song to The Salsa Rhythm Machine, you may have to synchronize it.

Hit songs commonly appear on a few different CDs. First, the original CD, then a “hits” CD, then a “best of” CD, and sometimes even a second “best of” CD.

For some reason, the engineers who put together these CDs will add or remove silence at the beginning of songs. So, you may have a CD with a song on it that is slightly different than the one that we used to script the song. If you use that song with the Salsa Rhythm Machine, it will be out of sync.

However, the song is probably exactly the same except for a little bit of silence at the beginning. So, to save you the cost of re-purchasing the song, you can use this window to shift the script forward or backward to get it to sync-up.

Since you can’t tell if the song is in-sync with the program until after you have learned salsa rhythm, we have included instructions with each song so that you can see if the song and the script match up. Click the song in the list to see the instructions. Then use the Songs window to play the song, and watch The Count window very closely. If it looks out of sync, then you have to decide if the program is ahead or behind, and by how many counts.

In salsa music, one count is usually around 0.3 seconds. If the program seems to be ahead of your song by two counts, shift it forward by 0.6 seconds. It seems like you should shift it backward, but if the program is ahead that means it is playing the counts too early and they need to be shifted forward in time.

Shifting forward will add time to each count and cause the counts to be played later.

Shifting backward will subtract time from each count and cause the counts to be played earlier.

The program keeps track of how much shifting you do, so you don’t have to worry about making a mistake. Just click the “Restore to Original” button to undo all your changes.