Insert Time throws off MIDI loop

[Matt Mayfield]

I love Reaper, but there seem to be deep, systemic design flaws in its MIDI implementation. I've used many other DAWs, and none of them have ever shown the kind of opaque and frustrating behavior Reaper does when dealing with MIDI items.

Even after taking the time and effort to fully understand timebases and "Ignore Project Tempo" on MIDI items, the behavior is still not always predictable. It seems very dangerous to make any kind of tempo or time signature changes to an existing project... as touched on by many of the issues linked in this forum post.

The latest thing I've discovered is a situation where you can't do a simple Insert Time without screwing up the sync between MIDI and audio.

The use case is:

- Click track using MIDI (a one-bar loop)
- MIDI item has Ignore Project Tempo UNchecked
- There are some tempo changes prior to the insert point
- Trying to Insert Empty Space at Time Selection, 8 bars

Here is a demonstration: https://youtu.be/OxFdhvShUmc

Note that this happens regardless of Timebase for the track/item set to Time or Beats. Also, since there are tempo changes in the project, I'm not able to use the Ignore Project Tempo setting because then the loop won't follow the tempo of the audio.

I can't imagine a use case in which this kind of behavior with MIDI is desirable for any reason. Am I missing something?

While I'd like to try to understand what's going on "under the hood" to make this happen, I'd much rather Reaper simply behave in a predictable and useful way when dealing with projects that contain both MIDI and audio (like Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools, etc., etc. do).

Reaper has so many advantages (multi-platform, lightweight, incredibly scriptable and customizable) that this one (very) weak spot causes all the more pain, since I don't want to switch back to another DAW. If any devs are reading this, I ask you to please consider making some foundational changes to Reaper's MIDI implementation that can allow it to be more of an intuitive tool, and less of a source of frustration and lost work.