MIDI editing interface peculiarities

1

Are these bugs, or am I doing something wrong?

Using the bar at bottom, cannot get the timeline to advance beyond a certain point in the song.

When trying to select a range, cannot get the time line to scroll, making it difficult to select anything outside of the current screen. (This is possible in the regular timeline.)

Multiple paste: If a value of several measures is entered, the pasted notes gradually shift from measure to measure.

Or, today, depite selecting measure 11 for paste from, it pastes from somewhere in measure 4 and, in addition, ignores the number of repetitions.

When playing back a MIDI track, it suddenly stopped. Discovered you had to go to the regular view and manually extend the length of the track.

Sometimes, when I switch back to the MIDI editor, it unknowningly defaults to eraser, resulting in unintended results upon clicking.

Step recording stops working.

Is there a decent MIDI editor out there that works well with n-Track? I wind up using Master Tracks Pro, whose DOS version I bought decades ago, and whose Windows version (if you can find it) works somewhat well.

2

StoneAged, I’ll try to answer to your troubles step by step.

Using the bar at bottom, cannot get the timeline to advance beyond a certain point in the song.

The length of the Pianoroll time axis is forced by the length of the current MIDI part you’re editing. The range goes form the beginning of the part to the last MIDI note.
We can improve this behaviour by adding more room to the scroll page.

When trying to select a range, cannot get the time line to scroll, making it difficult to select anything outside of the current screen. (This is possible in the regular timeline.)

The pianoroll timeline automatically scrolls when you perform a temporal selection from the pianoroll time axis, it doesn’t when you perform a free selection of the MIDI events, drawing a selection rectangle in the workspace using the mouse (if it’s what you meant).
We’re evaluating to add this behaviour also on the workspace free selection.

Multiple paste: If a value of several measures is entered, the pasted notes gradually shift from measure to measure.
Or, today, depite selecting measure 11 for paste from, it pastes from somewhere in measure 4 and, in addition, ignores the number of repetitions.

I wasn’t able to reproduce the issue. Could you please send me a list of actions that step by step lead to the problem?

When playing back a MIDI track, it suddenly stopped. Discovered you had to go to the regular view and manually extend the length of the track.

What do you mean by “Playing back a MIDI track”? Playing the song with the the MIDI track soloed? Is there any error or warning message that shows up after the stop? Or does the playback stop after reaching the end of the song?

Sometimes, when I switch back to the MIDI editor, it unknowningly defaults to eraser, resulting in unintended results upon clicking.

Please remember that the editing tool can be also selected by hitting the keys Alt or Ctrl.

Step recording stops working.

I’ve tested the Step recording and it seems to work properly. Maybe the problems you’re experiencing are due to a particular configuration you’re using. Could you please zip and send the program data folder ("C:\Users[Your Username]\AppData\Roaming\n-Track Studio 9), excluding the “Sounds” folder if there’s one, to andrea@ntrack.com, so that I can try to reproduce the issues using your configuration?
(The App Data folder may be hidden, to show it from the Windows folder window, press the Alt key, then click on the View menu → Options-> View tab, then activate the 'Show hidden files, folders, and drives’.)

Thanks,
Andrea

3

Thank you for your response.

By MIDI playback, I mean play a MIDI file through an externally connected the synth. I do this in order to record a wave file. Playback stopped in spite of their being remaining notes. Switching to the regular timeline and manually extending the MIDI track solved this.

If the length of the piano roll is limited to the current length of the MIDI part, it is very difficult to add manually notes to the end. I did find a workaround, but it’s hard to explain. At the top, if you click a time to establish a starting point for play, for example, you can drag that, and it will scroll beyond the end of the MIDI part. But it’s jumpy.

“drawing a selection rectangle in the workspace using the mouse (if it’s what you meant).” Yes, this is what I meant.

Multiple paste: This has been a problem on my system for years. It has never really worked.

Essentially, it seems that as I use the MIDI interface, features begin to drop away, and other features get currupted. It works at first, then becomes unusable. I know nothing about programming, but I wonder if the application stops being able to access resources. In this case, I was trying to edit about 7 MIDI parts. After a couple of hours, I finally had to give up.

While I’m at it, Move track up/down in Properties also does not work on my system. In some songs, it initiates a permenant loop in the GUI: the track moves back and forth from the old position to new position. This cannot be stopped without quitting n-Track. Re-opening it shows the track to be in the new position. In other cases, it only moves the track back and forth between the new position and old position. It won’t advance further.

If there is something I can change in my system, I’ll be more than happy to. I’m used to n-Track, and would like to continue using it.

4

Thanks for your detailed report. I’ve also received the n-Track configuration folder you sent me.
We’ll work on this stuff.

1 Like
5

I have discovered the cause of this. Holding Alt while in the MIDI editor selects the Eraser. When Alt is released, it returns to the previous selected tool. If I use Alt + tab to switch to another program, then use it again to switch back to n-Track, the MIDI tool (unexpectedly) becomes Eraser. Not sure if anything can be done about this. Just thought I’d let you know.

1 Like