Random notes shortened

[David Pollock]

In a large and long orchestral project, I am suddenly finding tracks where notes have been shortened as you see in this screenshot. When it happens, it happens with a number of notes across many measures. And the shortened notes are so short that it is really difficult to be able to grab them and drag them back out. In other words, this is a major pain (and coming near the end of this thing I've worked on for months).

I know that it is possible to accidentally select all the notes of a specific note in a track and accidentally change them while changing one of them in another place. But that is not what's happening here since there is suddenly so much of it and it is different notes here and there. I don't see anything in the archive about this. Any ideas?

Win10 machine with latest Cakewalk.

Edited September 19, 2023 by David Pollock

[David Baay]

Having done thousands of hours of MIDI editing using many differnt techniques over the years (and made many mistakes along the way), I have to think this is due to a procedual error of some sort - likely involving the inadvertent selection of offscreen notes as you surmised. A seemingly random selection could be the result of using Process > Find/Change or the related Edit > Select by Filter.

Are all the short notes the same duration now? Different note numbers and not the same note in differnet octaves? Different velocities, Different beat:tick times? Is the clip contiguous or made up of copied/slip-edited snippets?

Hopefully you have earlier copies of the project from which you can recover the original MIDI.

EDIT: I should add that Process > Find/Change or a combination of Edit > Select by Filter  and the Event Inspector may actually be your friend in recovering from this. You can use them to find all the short notes and lengthen to some fixed value or by a percentage of the current length.

Edited September 19, 2023 by David Baay

[David Pollock]

Thanks for the selection/find suggestion. I will see if that will help. 

I would have agreed that I must have done something wrong, but I have spent many hours in Cakewalk without this ever happening before, and it happens on different note numbers on different kinds of tracks. I don't think I did anything to cause this. 

[John Vere]

15 hours ago, David Pollock said:

I don't think I did anything to cause this. 

Sorry my friend,  but it is a 99.5% probability that you did.  Don’t feel bad. As David said after Zillion hours  of midi editing in my life I’ve seen it all. Combinations of how stuff gets selected and keyboard shortcuts often lead to this sort of mess. 
One of the huge reasons to save versions or safety copies as you work on large projects.  
And this is a fact for all editing software. I just lost 30 minutes of editing in Vegas and only to find out I’d somehow turned off auto save.  It was a keyboard shortcut I think. 

[David Pollock]

1 hour ago, JohnnyV said:

Sorry my friend,  but it is a 99.5% probability that you did. 

I hear you, but I guess we'll never know for sure. Given all the other odd things happening in this project, and the fact that this happened a lot in this project while never before being an issue for me, I do not believe I caused this.