Editing MIDI without messing things up?

[JimmiG]

One thing I often encounter in Reaper is that MIDI is very unpredictable. For example, if I improvise on a MIDI keyboard over a short loop, and don't hit stop exactly at the end of the loop, the MIDI notes somehow continue outside of the looped area.

Trying to drag the notes and markers around usually messes things up even more by splitting up the clip somewhere in the middle etc.

Here's an example of something that happened recently. In the first picture, the notes are correct, but for some reason, the marker has magically moved slightly to the right in time. In the second pic, I tried to move the marker to the left to align it with the start of the actual MIDI clip. However, this had the effect of also moving the notes so that the timing is off...argh!

I tried dragging with every combination of Ctrl, Alt and Shift pressed but nothing worked. In the end I just create a new clip and painted the notes in, because it was such a simple thing. But I would like to learn how to do it properly..

This may seem like a n00b question, but there must be something crucial I'm missing, because I never have these problems in Reason, Live etc.

[gofer]

As far as I can tell all your trouble has to do with how Reaper does item loops.
I think you want to try unchecking "Loop item source" (right click -> Item settings, there is also a checkbox in item properties for this) before dragging around MIDI item edges (unless you actually drag the item edge to make the item repeat itself).


In your pics the grey bar on the left is where the item loop source starts. It's the same thing as the little triangles you see on looped items in the arrange view marking the spot where the item content will repeat itself. The time between this bar and the item content to the right of it is fixed, so when you move the bar your content moves as well. (The same applies to audio content, but you can't drag loop edges for audio, so it's actually added flexibility in the MIDI editor which gets people into trouble.)

I don't know how it got to the position in picture 1), I've never seen it move on it's own. One way to get to the situation in picture 1) is if the recording actually started at this slightly off position and you manually dragged the left item edge (probably in arrange view) to the even bar position while "Loop source" is enabled. Basically you revealed a bit of a previous loop iteration by doing that.

If you want your item to loop you can repair this situation by
- drag the left edge of the item to the loop start marker (so both are at the same position),
- switch "Loop item source" off,
- then drag the left item edge back to where you want the item to start (you might also need to drag the right item edge so it has a correct full measure length).
- After this procedure you can switch "Loop source" back on.

If you don't intend to drag out loops of the item you can just switch "Loop source" off and disregard the rest.

[JimmiG]

Thanks! That probably explains most of the problems I've had. If I only knew to search for "Loop item source", but without knowing what I was actually encountering, it's hard to know what to search for.

This definitely makes Reaper behave more like other DAWs. I can also finally resize (extend) MIDI items without having Reaper inserting notes into the empty space.

I never use that weird "loop mode", it was just getting in my way. If I want a clip to repeat, I simply CTRL+Drag the entire clip to copy it. That makes it easier to add variations too, because changing notes in one place doesn't affect any other part of the song. I could see this as being useful for audio, but for MIDI, it's just confusing. Especially for users migrating from other DAWs. This, and the fact that the default Timebase is "Time" rather than "Beats" has probably scared away quite a few potential new users.

[jnif]

Originally Posted by gofer

I don't know how it got to the position in picture 1), I've never seen it move on it's own.

Loop start bar can move on it's own when quantizing notes. This is very hideous if you quantize an item first in MIDI editor and after that you loop the item in arrange view. In those cases you don't see the displacement of the loop start bar at all. And probably it is displaced so little that you don't even notice it in the arrange view when dragging the loop. You probably notice it only much later when you continue editing and start to see/hear some weird timing shifts in MIDI notes.

The bug has been reported here:
Quantizing extends looped MIDI items

jnif

[gofer]

That report is about moving the loop end when quantizing moves a note end so that the item source is forced to get longer, right? I reproduced that and set that issue to confirmed .


But I can't make quantize move the start bar in a way which would lead to the situation the OP shows in his pic.