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Old 10-28-2014, 02:20 PM   #1
efflux
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Default Inserting Time Signature Changes Moves Items

When I insert a time signature change it moves later MIDI items to be in line with the new beats arrangement. This is no good. Is there any way to stop this?
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Old 10-28-2014, 03:31 PM   #2
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I've had to move the project to Logic. Sadly, much as I like Reaper I have not been able to replace Logic for a single project yet. Logic has bugs and annoyances but no major brick wall problems. Reaper does have these. The way Reaper deals with time signatures appears to be a complete show stopper disaster. This is a basic fundamental of music that other DAWs don't have problems with.
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Old 10-28-2014, 04:50 PM   #3
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If the project time mode is "Beats (position, length, rate)" or "Beats(position only)" then items will move with any adjustment to the musical time structure.

Try changing the mode to "Time" and see if it does what you want. Normally, staying constant to the musical position is required and expected for MIDI events, it is their reference.


Edit: Nope, MIDI sticks to musical time even when both "Timebase for items..." and "Timebase for tempo..." are set to "Time".

MIDI is musically referenced though, are you saying you need a MIDI event at a particular point in Time, when tempo, etc, are altered around it? If so, I'm not sure how to help you.

Edit2: Or did you want only a section in the middle to have the new tempo/signature, and later sections to retain their current structure? -if so, place a marker before the end section to preserve its tempo & sig, and then place your changing marker at its required position. That closer to what you were trying to achieve..?




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Old 10-28-2014, 05:34 PM   #4
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It needs to be able to work the way it does in Logic. There may be other ways Reaper is trying to work but none of that's much use as far as I'm concerned because I want time signature to be purely a display of the way notes are grouped. That's essentially all it is in then end. It needs to be that you can insert time signatures and the MIDI stays where it is in terms of time or rather the beat regardless of what that beat is in which bar of whatever time signature. Setting it to time does nothing as you've noticed.

Having said this. The whole procedure of inserting time signature appears to be completely broken. I can't even figure out how it's moving the MIDI. Some is moved, some isn't, some is out of time in other ways. Essentially time signature in Reaper is utterly broken if you add it after programming MIDI items.

I've had other problems in Reaper which I'll post about. It depresses me to have to go back to Logic but Cockos need to do work on Reaper's MIDI. The piano roll in Reaper is really great but there are a lot of bugs and under the hood problems with the MIDI which are much worse than Logic's.
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Old 10-28-2014, 05:41 PM   #5
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This would be an example of what I'd want to do. Say I have made a sequence but actually some of the bars are 6/4 rather than 4/4. You can't simply change that without Reaper utterly messing it all up. Nothing should move because lets say you have 12 beats, that could be either three bars of 4/4 or two bars of 6/4. This is dead simple in other DAWs and so it should be because it's a fundamental thing.
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Old 10-28-2014, 09:12 PM   #6
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I've had a lot of problems with this myself... I absolutely love Reaper, but the way it handles time signatures and tempo changes really needs to be revamped. If you have a midi item that is 4 bars long in 4/4 time, if you change the time sig to 2/4, you should have 8 bars (but in Reaper you still have 4 bars). This is so fundamental. But, unless I'm missing something, this can't be achieved with any of the combinations of project timebase and tempo/ time signature timebase.

Can anyone shed any light on this?
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Old 10-29-2014, 06:47 AM   #7
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jaydrake,

Your example is absolutely correct. That's what happens and it shouldn't because often after entering notes you decide on time signature changes. All that should happen is that the representation of where the bars are should move not the notes. Obviously this means the notes will be moving to different bars if you change time signature but the flow of the beats regardless of bar lines should not change. It's up to the user to put these bars in the correct places.

I find Reaper to be a really great composing tool because the piano roll is really good. You can also use actions to create chords etc. Really great for trying out ideas. You can create your own tools in the piano roll toolbar so it can all be done one handed without key shortcuts. This is very useful if you're playing an instrument while working in the piano roll. The item list is great as well. Very fast workflow. Logic's piano roll is nowhere near as good and it's sluggish compared to Reaper.

So Reaper is near to being able to replace Logic or Cubase but not while there are problems with time signature. There are a few other issues I've had but this time signature thing is a real showstopper unless you never play around with time signature. Sure, you can just ignore time signature changes but then it gets hard to navigate the sequence because you can't clearly see where you are.
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Old 10-29-2014, 08:07 AM   #8
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Where are all the fanboys who normally come leaping to REAPER's defence?

Sadly, it's all true. REAPER's handling of time signatures is its single weakest point, and it's about time it was fixed.
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Old 10-29-2014, 08:18 AM   #9
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Efflux,

There is a really stupid work around. Using an example of 4 bars of 4/4 and you want to change those 4 bars to 8 bars of 2/4. In reaper, you get 4 bars of 2/4 time..., you can drag the midi item to 8 bars and it restores all your midi data and accomplishes what ought to be automatic. As I said this is a really ridiculous way to do things, but in some cases might beat going back and forth between DAW's.

Again, I'm hoping I'm overlooking something obvious here and that there is a proper way to accompish this automatically.
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Old 10-29-2014, 08:31 AM   #10
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Fex,

I agree, and I would imagine it to be a pretty easy fix. It's got to be either an oversight, or ignorance (with all due respect) to how midi ought to respond to time signature changes.

It's probably more about the dev's being made aware of this than anything else. Maybe we should be talking about this in feature requests or issue tracker forums so that it is seen by dev's???
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Old 10-29-2014, 08:47 AM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jaydrake View Post
I agree, and I would imagine it to be a pretty easy fix.
I would love to think that's the case, but I know that this has been covered before, and I can't believe that the devs are ignorant of the issue. This leads me to suspect that a substantial part of the progrsm might be fundamentally flawed, and need rebuilding from scratch.... but what do I know?
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Old 10-29-2014, 08:52 AM   #12
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I found the solution. In Item properties, change the item timebase to "time". (make sure you hit "apply"). Try it.
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Old 11-04-2014, 08:05 AM   #13
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jaydrake.

I just tried that and it seems it does solve the problem. You need to change every item to time though. I've only just tested this so haven't fully explored it except, now try changing tempo and the item has no link to the beat. Also, to change tempo you have to create a tempo track and select all the tempo points to drag them to change it (as far as I can see) but even with beats selected instead of time, this throws up problems with the time signature getting messed up for some reason.

This is all a disaster. Apple and Steinberg have no worries at all in this department despite all the other problems in those apps because these features are properly designed.

There may be reasons from an audio perspective why things work the way they do. I haven't thought that through yet but these issues don't exist in any other app I know of which does time signature changes.

Tempo has nothing to do with time signature if you are composing and arranging music yet in Reaper they are linked in a tempo track by default. This is not the case in other apps. They have a tempo track and a time signature track. In Reaper every time signature change marker is also a tempo change marker. By default you need the beat number across the whole song to have nothing to do with time signature. What I mean is that a beat falling on say the 32nd quarter note in the song should always be on that beat no matter what your bar arrangements are in terms of time signatures and what bar that beat is in (setting item to time solves this) but at the same time adjusting tempo should not effect this linking of beat either. Time signature should not be linked to anything except the basic beat and maybe moving regions but this can throw up problems if you move to places where the time signature doesn't fit right. That would be the case in any app of course. I'd prefer time signature to be completely divorced from anything and just set it up manually as a visual guide. That's all it is anyway, a way to know how the music is grouped into sections of feel in beat emphasis.
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Old 11-04-2014, 08:23 AM   #14
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I think a fundamental problem with Reaper is that MIDI items behave the same as audio items. For example, another area is the non destructive nature of some editing which is pretty much irrelevant for MIDI composing but may be useful for audio. You have to use glue all the time with MIDI when you are adjusting regions otherwise things like looping can get all messed up. You should be able to default set this so that you don't need to "glue" items.

Last edited by efflux; 11-04-2014 at 08:49 AM.
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Old 11-04-2014, 08:35 AM   #15
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To have a tempo and time signature track is insane. For example in Logic and other apps where this is separate you can adjust your time signatures anywhere in the song and it will all still have one setting for tempo unless you add changes in the tempo track. Why on earth you would ever need a tempo setting every time there is a time signature change is beyond me but this creates editing hell.
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Old 11-04-2014, 08:47 AM   #16
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As far as I can see, the settings for the timebase that say beats are wrong because the items do not follow beats at all if you introduce time signature changes, they change beats depending on the bars i.e. the notes will stay in a certain bar when they should move to another one to be the same beat as in beat meaning the beat number in the song regardless of time signature bar divisions.

Also, the time signature must be in a separate track from tempo. This is a fundamental flaw.
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Old 11-04-2014, 08:55 AM   #17
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jaydrake View Post
Efflux,

There is a really stupid work around. Using an example of 4 bars of 4/4 and you want to change those 4 bars to 8 bars of 2/4. In reaper, you get 4 bars of 2/4 time..., you can drag the midi item to 8 bars and it restores all your midi data and accomplishes what ought to be automatic. As I said this is a really ridiculous way to do things, but in some cases might beat going back and forth between DAW's.

Again, I'm hoping I'm overlooking something obvious here and that there is a proper way to accompish this automatically.
I agree with you that if workarounds are possible then the extra work in it it would still be better than using some other DAWs because Reaper has a lot of benefits that these other DAWs don't have. My work speed in the Reaper piano roll is way faster than in Logic. My problem at the moment is that I'm quite new to Reaper so these basic problems are destroying my workflow so I end up taking the MIDI into Logic just to get things done while I explore solutions in Reaper.
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Old 11-04-2014, 09:16 AM   #18
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The fundamental problem is this. If you change the time signature and lets say you add a beat by doing this, the notes do not change bars, they stay in the same bar and thus essentially are coming on a later beat in the song. In Logic these notes and all following will be shifted to the preceding bar and this is obviously a one beat shift so this beat is the same beat as before in terms of the overall beats and time as long as tempo is the same. Changing this item to time based in Reaper does this but then there is no link to beats at all meaning that if you change tempo the MIDI doesn't slow down or speed up. You would have to constantly change between time and beats. I guess the problems with changing tempo aren't so severe because generally I tend to have the tempo the way I want from square one. I rarely change that after starting to work but you can do it in Reaper if there are time signature changes even although it's a bit of hassle.
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Old 11-04-2014, 09:30 AM   #19
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Can we conclude that there is a bug here since setting the item to follow track/project settings doesn't work the same as setting it to it's own setting of time even when track and project are set to time?
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Old 11-04-2014, 10:07 AM   #20
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The best workaround if you don't want the items moving is to create actions and buttons to do what jaydrake says. Select all items and change their properties to time then switch back to beat when you've finished adding the time signature change. To me though, we need a beat option that that shifts notes in bars so that they aren't moved around in the timeline but are still connected to the general beat so that tempo changes still work.
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Old 11-04-2014, 10:10 AM   #21
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Quote:
Originally Posted by efflux View Post
Can we conclude that there is a bug here since setting the item to follow track/project settings doesn't work the same as setting it to it's own setting of time even when track and project are set to time?
This observation has been brought up here also (and I confirmed there)

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=146002

So yes, I'd say it's a bug (or oversight).
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Old 11-04-2014, 10:17 AM   #22
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I think the problem is that with audio you essentially have time and items can be linked to beats but with MIDI you also have an extra layer of data in the notes that links to beats in the bar. Reaper doesn't allow us to automatically change this data to shift notes and their items to different bars when we add or remove beats with time signature insertions. This is what other DAWs do by default but not by removing any beat relationship and changing to time. The notes are still linked to the beat.
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Old 11-04-2014, 10:38 AM   #23
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Just to add here, the fact that I was able to create buttons to change all the items to time and then back to beats is exactly an example of why I want to use Reaper. Some hard wired problem or workflow headache in another app that doesn't have any macro functions like this and you're screwed.
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Old 11-08-2014, 06:54 PM   #24
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Don't turn back now efflux!

Thanks for pointing out that Cubase and Logic have this better. I did not know that. Suspected so. I do know that Sibelius handles it better.

I tried to start a conversation about this recently.

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=147203
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Old 02-04-2015, 11:07 AM   #25
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Just to add to the discussion, setting all the items to time, changing time sig, then changing back to beats/bars, worked for me.

I was getting frustrated by the same problem Efflux. Started something in 4/4, but it turned into 3/4 while writing.

- Select All Items
- Right-click on one and go to "Item Properties"
- Set the time base to Time
- Hit apply and close the window.
- Insert tempo/meter change
- Go back to Item Properties and set them back to Beats/Bars

If you were changing the ruler settings, or using a contextual menu from the top of the window, it won't have changed the items properties. It has to be done on all the items.

Note though that I didn't make any tempo changes.

Sorry if this was already answered further up, I read about half the thread.
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Old 02-04-2015, 02:00 PM   #26
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Default Timebase hell

I've been using Reaper for years on a PC and when switched to MAC I tried Logic X because I had a few problems with Reaper on my MAC. After using Logic long enough to hate it I happily came back to Reaper. I still think it's the best DAW for the price.

The problem with MIDI items and timebase has always been there and I don't understand why it has not been addressed yet. I've read so many posts asking for a more logical approach to timebase in midi. Can someone explain to me why the Reaper programmers don't seem to care about this.

I also noticed another bug probably related to this. When there are tempo changes in a measure (for example a ralentendo at the end of a section) and you try to move midi notes with snap enabled, the notes you move don't follow the snap resolution.

Lately I worked on creating midi files of the basic tracks of some jazz pieces. Starting from an mp3, I've had to create tempo maps of the pieces I wanted to transcribe before creating midi tracks of the main instruments (usually drums, bass and piano). Since I was never sure how timebase worked in Reaper it was a P.I.T.A. I had to try different approaches before finding one that worked for me. In the process I had to play with "item timebase" in the item properties window and "ignore project tempo" in the source properties window. The trial and error process was so messy I can't even explain how I got it to work. The best advice I can give to people who want to do that type of work is to make sure your tempo/time signature map is absolutely right from start to end before you enter any midi data... otherwise you will be in deep shit.
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