[Shroud]

I have the “snap to grid” option on all the time when working with midi tracks, and yet so many times I find that some notes I’ve placed are very slightly off the grid. So slightly in fact that I don’t see it unless I zoom in a lot more than is usually needed, then I can see at some point that a note starts for example a “pixel” too late.

 

I noticed this issue in the early stages and thought I had forgotten to set snap to grid. Then the first time I compiled with Magma I got a lot of errors in various tracks which were in fact due to these micro mis-alignments (e.g. lyrics not synced with notes in vocals or drum fill lanes not equal).

 

There was then a specially worrying case… I noticed from the RB preview plugin view that in a specific drum section many pro drums toms showed up as pro drums cymbals, while others were correct, seemingly at random. It was because of micro misalignments so I went there and fixed them all. Next day and a few hours of work later, they are back again wrong Now I could have forgotten to save, except that I am clicking Ctrl-S practically every other minute…

 

Speaking of which, often (not always) when pressing Save I can see that the track slightly adjusts horizontally by a pixel or so. I thought it was only a visual adjustment but now I am starting to worry that it might mess up and adjust the midi notes themselves.

 

Am I doing something wrong? Have I forgotten some important settings? Or is it just that the dozens hours already spent on my first custom are already taking their toll on my mental sanity?

[Alternity]

The non-snapped notes usually happen from copy/pasting. If you want to avoid these you’d have to avoid copy/pasting altogether. This seems to be a 4.22 problem as I’m using the latest version of reaper for Audica authoring and I don’t have this issue at all, but the latest version of reaper have some incompatiblities with rock band so that’s unfortunate.

If your song is not complicated (i.e. all straight or all triplet notes) you can probably just select all the notes from the track and use the quantitizing function to fix the off-grid notes.

[Buster66]

Sometimes also if you hit the right/left arrow keys at the wrong time it will ‘nudge’ things off the grid to the right or left. This killed me for a while before I learned never to hit the arrow keys unless I was really sure what was going to happen.

[Shroud]

Thanks.

 

I was using the quantizing function but it didn’t seem to work. Then I noticed that by default it adjusts the beginning of notes but not the ending.

 

Still, I have a couple of triplets in some track so I was afraid to lose them if I didn’t setup the grid right before quantizing. But luckily the pixel-wide errors were in other tracks.

 

I have fixed everything of course, but it’s just annoying to know Reaper does this.

[Author]

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