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Best practices when copying MIDI clips between projects?


chris.r

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My MIDI clips typically fall far off the grid. Inside the same project, when moving or copying, it's enough to keep the Snap setting to copy 'By', problem solved. When I try to copy clips onto a new created project, they always land in an arbitrary place regardless Snap settings. Is there a way to copy clips between projects and keep their relative position on the grid?

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If you need all or most of the clips, and they're going into a totally new project, I second Steve's approach.

If you only need one or a small subset of clips from the source project and/or you're copying to an existing project that has other content already, the easiest way I can think of is this.

- Enable snap to Landmarks in the target project with only the Now Time selected and disable snap to musical resolution.

-Select the source clip and copy (Ctrl+C) the start time from the Select module in the Control Bar.

- Hit G in the target project to get the Go To Time dialog, paste (Ctrl+V) the start time and Enter.

- Drag the clip from the source project to the target (or copy-paste it) and it will snap to the Now time.

Obviously this is a bit painful if you have a lot of clips to copy, but that's the best I can come up with off the top of my head.

 

Edited by David Baay
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If I was copying into an existing project, I might copy entire track(s) at a time instead of copying individual clips.

Often, it's a lot easier to delete unwanted copies than to mess with only copying what is needed.

And since the source and target both start at 0, alignment is easy.

 

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1 hour ago, scook said:

Since it is a new project, consider

  • saving the original project as a MIDI file then
  • open the MIDI file and
  • save it as the new project 

The new project will have all the MIDI including the tempo map as the original file.

It might be easier to perform a "Save As" or "Save Copy As" to the new project name, without copying the audio clips unless they are needed in the new project.

This will preserve not only the MIDI data but the instrument setups too.

It really depends on how much of the old projects needs to be copied.

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It was a temporary project with loads of different softsynths across tracks where I could explore some draft musical ideas before letting them into a fresh clean project. Most of the content is going to garbage but a couple performances made into the project. I could repeat everything from scratch in the new clean project but a few clips were actually made nicely enough to make me want them just copy paste.

So far I found out that if I extend clip start to the beginning of a bar and copy to a new project, it's content will be kept in place so that's one way. Another way is to adjust clip's start times, in the inspector, after paste. But I really wished there was simpler way. No biggie.

Copying tracks between projects is no straightforward either. You'd have to 'Save As' project, as per Steve's advice above, or use track templates, if you needed to copy track setups.

You have posted some excellent advises too, guys. Thanks! 

Edited by chris.r
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2 hours ago, chris.r said:

So far I found out that if I extend clip start to the beginning of a bar and copy to a new project, it's content will be kept in place so that's one way. Another way is to adjust clip's start times, in the inspector, after paste. But I really wished there was simpler way.

If start times are in weird places because the MIDI was recorded without a click, you can use Set Measure/Beat At Now to put the start time exactly on  a beat before copying. It won't affect the timing before or after the Set point, but you can undo it after the copy if necessary. When I'm working with unquantized MIDI (almost always), I frequently snap just the first note of a section to the measure to make editing easier which might also work, depending on the circumstances.

Edited by David Baay
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I think I'll just create a dummy clip at 1:1:0 and then select and drag copy all the clips I'm interested in along with it.

Edit: it still didn't want to align properly to the starting point even though the phantom graphics while dragging suggested that I did everything right. Had to correct it afterwards that's why the first clip was needed. Very reluctant is our Cakewalk sometimes.

Edited by chris.r
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