What happened to quantize/snap/time sigs ?

[maxdis]

Hi,

I'm using last official Reaper version, but since some months ago I started noticing weird snap/quantize/time sig bugs. I thought most of them would have been fixed years ago, but it seems that something was broken again in some of the recent updates.
These are hard to reproduce, but this one you can check for yourself; as you can see, no matter how many times I hit "Quantize", the notes never snap to the grid.





Working with this project I found many other weird issues althought I can't reproduce them at will, but basically sometimes I'm finding the items slightly offset to the grid, other times they are slightly shortened at the end, and in other cases they will have a loop points at the end (when it happens, if i try to apply the "Glue" action the loop point never go away). These bugs seems to happens when I'm applying time sig changes, moving items and (but I'm not really sure about that) it seems that with some specific BPM values there are more chances to have bugs.

[foxAsteria]

It's been a while since I tried, but I think that happens when you have gradual tempo changes in your project and I think the only way to get things perfectly aligned is to split the item at the tempo markers and glue. Then quantize will have accurate grid positions. Like I said tho, been a while...

[nofish]

Also, the MIDI editor position resolution is tick based.
So depending what you've set in 'Preferences (-> Media) -> MIDI -> Ticks per quarter note for new MIDI items'
it might not snap 100% exactly to grid.

Maybe try with a higher tick setting (only applies to newly created MIDI items I think) and see if it helps?

[maxdis]

Originally Posted by foxAsteria

It's been a while since I tried, but I think that happens when you have gradual tempo changes in your project and I think the only way to get things perfectly aligned is to split the item at the tempo markers and glue. Then quantize will have accurate grid positions. Like I said tho, been a while...

There's no gradual tempo changes in my project, but anyway I'm splitting items (both at tempo marker and grid lines), hitting quantize multiple times and nothing is being quantized...also, "glue" doesn't remove loop points at the very end of items (that shouldn't even been there anyway). If (after many tries) I manage to quantize notes, remove loop points and (apparently) align items to the grid (I'm never totally sure about that), after working on some other section of the project the previously items and notes are messed up again. I'm often working on project with multiple tempo changes, and since some months these problems seems to happens all the time.

[maxdis]

Originally Posted by nofish

Also, the MIDI editor position resolution is tick based.
So depending what you've set in 'Preferences (-> Media) -> MIDI -> Ticks per quarter note for new MIDI items'
it might not snap 100% exactly to grid.

Maybe try with a higher tick setting (only applies to newly created MIDI items I think) and see if it helps?

I'll check that, but I don't think we should be supposed to go there to have such basic feature (snapping) works fine...others DAW (Cubase, Studio One, etc...) are rock solid regarding snap and quantize, no need to change some weird setting.

[juliansader]

Originally Posted by maxdis

I'm using last official Reaper version, but since some months ago I started noticing weird snap/quantize/time sig bugs. I thought most of them would have been fixed years ago, but it seems that something was broken again in some of the recent updates.

What happened some months ago, is that REAPER more accurately displays the actual position at which MIDI events will be played. Weird snapping is the result of a misalignment of the MIDI item's source beats with the overall project beats. Explained in these threads:
MIDI Notes not snapping
[5.79] MIDI EDITOR: The problem with the positioning of midi notes

[maxdis]

Originally Posted by juliansader

What happened some months ago, is that REAPER more accurately displays the actual position at which MIDI events will be played. Weird snapping is the result of a misalignment of the MIDI item's source beats with the overall project beats. Explained in these threads:
MIDI Notes not snapping
[5.79] MIDI EDITOR: The problem with the positioning of midi notes

Thanks for these treads, I think I read them a while ago, but somewhat I forgot about it. It seems that I can't do anything to fix my project, beside starting a new one and copying midi notes.
I think this is a basic thing that should be addressed by devs, it should be the software taking care of these things, making appropriate roundings and/or visual adjustments. Actually this is not only a visual thing, I have some items that are getting a tiny loop point at the end, thus also repeating the first note in the item, making the song sounding wrong and also exporting unneeded notes when I'm using an external notation software.

I'm using Reaper since many years, but I never totally trusted it regarding precise snapping and placement of items and notes; I think this area needs some revamp, because there are too many things that could go wrong. Maybe this should be simplified, keeping some things "under the hood" and leaving some settings only for very rare, corner cases.