Am I doing this right?

[ET440]

So I'm just starting to play around with composing.  I play piano, so figure I will start there, and maybe experiment with orchestral stuff, too.  If I have a musical idea, I'll set up a track, hit record and play a few bars.  So far, so good.  The issue I'm running into is that the notes don't quite line up with the beats.  They're pretty close, but they need some tweaking.  I've been doing this in the piano roll, but it is really tedious.  The other approach I've taken is to use the regular sheet music staff.  Last night, I attempted to add a simple bar of 8th notes.  All looked good, but when I played the track, they were slightly off.  So then, I go into the piano roll, and try to move them ever so slightly.

All the videos I've seen on youtube show people recording tracks with the metronome going, and things seem to turn out great, but when I do it, notes slightly out of place, and fixing them manually takes a long time.  Is there some setting I should be using to make things easier, or maybe another program all together?  At this point, it almost seems easier if I just use blank manuscript paper and a pencil.  I am very new to all this, but doing it on the computer just seems so tedious.

[Xoo]

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