Is there a way of placing images in the timeline without having them snap to frames??

Question

I'm basically trying to make a short movie for a friend that involves stills that flick back and forth but i need them to sync to the music i have to go with it.  Clearly, the musics beat won't sit frame perfect so in order to get the effect i want, i assume there must be a function that would allow me to freely place images wherever i wish..... no??
Sadly, my logic kind of dictates that this won't be possible but if it's not, how the hell do people get images to change on beat with music etc??  Do they adjust the music to make it fit in with frames or what??
Any help is golden right now

Answer 1

I didn't see anyone mention the Sequence> Snap toggle. With that on, it will snap to things you may not want it to, like the CTI, other clips, and markers. Of course, it will still be snapping to the fame rate for a given sequence, but Steven already made a fine suggestion for how to imporve accuracy there. He's also right that you don't need to be mathematically correct in your alignment, just intuitively.
If it helps, here's an old trick for beat-matching. Play the audio, and with your best drummer's skillz, hit M on the keyboard each time you hear (feel?) the beat you want to sync to. M is the default shortcut for 'Marker', so when you're done you should have a marker near each beat which you can tweak by hand as needed. It may take a few tries to get it right, but it's a lot of fun.
You can then turn the snap toggle 'on' (if it's not already) and drop your images in to align up with the corresponding markers. Make sure you have the still image duration set to the right length (probably err on the long side to avoid gaps) before you import your imahes or it will get confusing.
In your case, you're flipping back and forth between just two images, so after setting up the markers where you want, I might put one image in v1 and one on v2, span them out to cover the whole audio you're matching to, and then use the razor tool. Or, better yet, use, shift M & cmd/ctrl K to make edits that correspond exactly to your markers. It will razor all the way through, but you can easily just trim the other tracks back out from the head afterwards because nothing will have moved.  However you do it, the point is to razor out portions of v2 where v1 needs to show through and then delete them (don't ripple).