What is the vertical line with the little diagonal white line at the bottom?

[user7776543]

As the title says - What is the vertical line with the little diagonal white line at the bottom?

It looks like a little triangle drawn slanting to the right at the botom of the line that seperates midi tracks into parts.

Where do these line come from? I know I didn't put them there intentionally, if at all.

What purpose do they serve?

How can I delete them? They prevent me from selecting files as a whole to edit in the microscope.

Ed: Ok, it's called a "snap offset". That doesn't tell me what it is and does, however, so an explanation would be welcome - wiki is not being very forthcoming.

Ed #2: The snap offset is moveable, and has nothing to do with the broken, segmented quality that the midi files somehow get. I did discover that "edit/glue selected items" will repair those breaks (aaaaahhhhhh!).

But I still don't know how those now-glued files got broken in the first place. Another explanation, please?

[DarkStar]

Snap offset is useful when you have a clip where the hit does not occur at the start of the clip.

Normally when you move a clip the start of the clip snaps to the grid. So for the clip i described the hit is not on the beat.

Set the Snap offset line to the hit then when you move the clip the Snap offset will snap to the grid, and the hit will be on the beat.

Here's a screenshot:
http://img375.imageshack.us/img375/103/dsr242snappoffsetsf9.png

I've repositioned the Snap offset on the lower copy of the clip.

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When you say "Broken" MIDI files, do you mean on several tracks or several clips on a single track or ... ?

HTH

[user7776543]

Thank you for your help.

I don't understand what the snap-offset has to do with the beginning of a midi file? Is it executing some command? I have no idea what it is doing.

In your example, why is it necessary to adjust the snap-offset after you have moved the wav file to where you want the "hit" (you mean stress, or starting beat, I assume) to be?

Is the snap-offset just some kind of marker, for ther benefit of the composer, to show where phrase beats (hits) begin? I would guess that it is.

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As to "broken" midi files, I mean that a single midi track that I have played and recorded gets shown as several segmented clips - i.e., if I try to hi-light them (make them green) I am not getting the entire midi clip that I played, only a fraction of it.

And that fraction opf a midi file is not necessarily the fraction that represents what I want the loop to be.

I am puzzled why Reaper has mande these decisions for me, about why I would want a single midi track that I have played and recorded live in a single session, to be broken up into so many small sections, and at seemingly random intervals.

I need to glue them back together so that I can edit the entire track (the track will become my loop).

Is that clearly explained? I hope.

N.B., I am recording midi tracks on a guitar synth, so perhaps the erratic nature of the guitar's midi signal is telling Reaper to start a new segment? It's just a guess.

[schwa]

If you have grid snapping on, any media items (audio or midi) will snap to beat divisions. If you have some item (usually audio) that doesn't start exactly on a beat, you can move the snap offset marker manually to where the beat starts in the item, so it then snaps properly. This snap offset marker is right at the start of the item by default, the only way it's anywhere else is if you accidentally dragged it (easy to do). If you don't want it where it is, drag it back to the start of the item.

As for unexpected splits in your midi items, this isn't Reaper making any decisions based on content. I can think of two ways this might have happened. Most likely is that you recorded something in a loop, which can create an odd-length take on the final pass (because recording was stopped before the loop completed) -- you'll know this is the case if the odd-length items say something like "take 5/5". Cycle back to the last take (shift-T) to see the last full-length take.

Another possibility is that you accidentally split the item by pressing "S". But Reaper is definitely not creating odd-length items on purpose based on looking at the content.

[the all new rob]

Is the snap-offset just some kind of marker, for ther benefit of the composer, to show where phrase beats (hits) begin? I would guess that it is.


There you go. It's like if your clip has a pickup to beat 1, but you want to make the beat 1 line up with the grid when you have snap to grid turned on, then you would put the snap offset at the beat 1 point in the clip to ensure that behavior.

On your other question, I think you are up against one of the things that bugs me most about loop recording midi in Reaper.

If you set a loop selection and engage the loop mode on the transport, your items will get gratuitous split points (http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=23047) if you punch in with the transport going.

http://stashbox.org/152643/gratuitous-split-points.PNG
"dude where's my take?"

[user7776543]

Ok, I think I understand what snap-offset is now and what it does, so I will start experimenting with it.

I can definitely see how it could be very useful - I have had several scenarios already where I wanted the loop to have an intro that I didn't then want looped on future repeats, so now I know how to do that, I think.

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As to track splitting - so "S" is a *physical* split of the actual track, and not just a way to *highlight* sections of a track?

In my desperation to discover the proper way to select/hilite portions of a track for micro-editing, I have been hitting S like mad. I guess I have been physically splitting these tracks myself without knowing it.

It wasn't clear in the wiki that "S for split" meant an actual division of a midi or audio track - I had assumed it was the means to help select/hilite a portion of the track.

I will certainly refrain from using S anymore, unless I know I want to!

But I am still in the dark as to how to quickly and correctly hilite a section of a track to bring it up for micro-editing, which is such an essential task.