Insert New Midi Item Question

[Andriko]

Hi all,

Another addition to the dumb questions list - When I insert a new midi item, it creates one bar/measure and adds it in, which is fine. However, when I goto extend it (dragging it along) each new measure has little black arrows in the corner and it just duplicates whatever I write into the first bar into all of them.

Presumabley I have turned something on or off, but I am not sure what.

Ideally, I just want the full notation for the track, but I am having similar problems using the notation editor.

Related to this, each added midi item in a track is seperate, how do I merge them into one so that the notation score is continuous (and contains all the midi items in one?).

Thanks,

Andreas

[dug dog]

Good morning, Andreas:

When you insert that new MIDI item, you could drag it out to the full length of your project before you put anything in it. (You'll see a whole series of those "little black arrows"). Right click on that dragged out item and select "Glue items". Now, you should have one long MIDI item.

OR.... Before you insert that new MIDI item, you could set your time selection to the full length of the project and, then, insert a new MIDI item. That should give you one blank MIDI item that's the full length of your initial time selection.

To "merge" several individual MIDI items on a single track, select them all, right click on one of them and select "Glue items".

[Andriko]

Great, thanks for the help!

[lunker]

What you are describing is called looping.

You can control whether or not dragging the edge of an item causes it to loop by editing the item properties. I can never remember if the default shortcut key for item properties is F2 or CTRL+F2, because I assigned those keys to other actions -- but you can also get to it by right-clicking on an item and selecting "Item properties ...". Once there, check/uncheck the box for "Loop source".

You can control whether or not looping is enabled for new items by going to Preferences > Project > Media Item Defaults, and checking/unchecking the boxes for "Loop source for ...". In you case, it sounds like you want to uncheck the box for "Loop source for new MIDI items".

[Coachz]

I toggle looping of any item this way and then extend the midi item by dragging the edge.

[nait]

I do what Lunker described but I just unchecked all those "loop source for" check boxes. To be honest, it's a completely unnecessary feature, for me. I get the reasoning behind it, but I'm just content with copy/pasting, even if something changes. I can see how it can make it easy to maintain a particular section of your song, but I'm a little set in my ways, and manually copy/pasting works well for me.


BTW, just as a note.. I'm not sure if this is default functionality, or something I turned on, but you can also insert a longer/shorter MIDI item based on what bars you have selected. That's usually what I do.. make a 2 bar selection, for example, then hit my shortcut (insert) for inserting a MIDI item. That way, right off the start, you can insert to the right size. But for changing it later, like I said, I prefer to have those "loop source for" preferences all disabled and like the default functionality to be resizing the item when I drag the side of it.

[juliansader]

Originally Posted by nait

I do what Lunker described but I just unchecked all those "loop source for" check boxes. To be honest, it's a completely unnecessary feature, for me. I get the reasoning behind it, but I'm just content with copy/pasting, even if something changes. I can see how it can make it easy to maintain a particular section of your song, but I'm a little set in my ways, and manually copy/pasting works well for me.

Especially if you paste/duplicate as *pooled* copies, so that edits in one item immediately propagates to all other copies.

Alternatively, if the items are unpooled, you can manually "propagate" changes to all similarly named items on the track.

[nait]

Yeah exactly, using pooled items seems more appropriate functionality for this for me than having items loop. Good to have options though, and at least we can turn that off if we don't use it!

[Andriko]

Thanks Everyone!