Newly recorded MIDI take damages previously recorded takes (SOLVED)

[Starship Krupa]

This evening while recording MIDI from my keyboard controller, I had the following happen, and am able to reproduce it every time, at will:

First I recorded 2 takes in loop record mode (settings: Comping, Create New Lane, New Takes on Top is unchecked) resulting in this, which is expected and fine:

Two takes, clips the full length of the loop, all data recorded and intact.

Then I had the idea to try playing another, shorter take that overlapped the existing ones, and that's where things went sideways:

As shown in this screen grab, I have my new take in its new lane, data intact, but the original takes have been split where the new clip begins and ends. If I had to bounce them back to one clip, that in itself would be a hassle, but a worse problem is that where the splits are, the MIDI notes have been truncated, thus ruining the first two takes. The 3rd clip in lane T3 is completely empty.

Also, the first bit of T3 is unmuted.

I was able to salvage the first 2 takes by deleting the newly-created clips and dragging out the remaining clip edge to reveal the MIDI notes (fortunately still there), but this seems like a lot of trouble and risk to go to (especially if it happens multiple times) and I'd rather just prevent it from happening in the first place.

With the first bit of T3 being unmuted like that, it sort of looks like a punch-in, but I didn't use Punch-in because I wasn't correcting anything, I just wanted to see if a different, shorter phrase would work in the track. It's not a punch-in, it's a whole new alternate take. I'm not sure what the "Auto Punch" setting does, but I have it unchecked. I didn't want the old takes to be split and slip-edited, I wanted to keep them in place so I could audition them and hear what works best.

This isn't an unusual task, I try out different parts all the time. I've had projects get messed up like this before, was fortunately able to salvage them. I'd rather not be breaking them in the first place. What am I doing wrong? Are there settings I can change to prevent it?

Edited February 12 by Starship Krupa

[David Baay]

Comping and Comp-recording is really not suited to MIDI because you can't split overlapping MIDI clips and have the start of one note cross-fade into the end of another smoothly as they would with audio. The truncation is inevitable in the absence of some fancy AI to preserve note durations across split points and glue notes that are on the same pitch. With MIDI you really just need to record sound-on-sound and do the editing manually. Even with audio if you split a note in one lane that isn't in the other lane, you're going to get some truncation. Comp-split and punch points need to be chosen to avoid this.

I should add that nothing is really being lost as Comping is all done by slip-editing. If you heal the splits or move them to reveal the MIDI that's been cropped out of existence, you'll find it's all still there.

Edited February 11 by David Baay

[reginaldStjohn]

You can always "heal" the split clips by swiping across the whole take with the smart tool.

http://legacy.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Arranging.57.html

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

Comping and Comp-recording is really not suited to MIDI

Yet the mode exists, and as far as I can tell, there's no description of what to expect in the documentation.

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

you really just need to record sound-on-sound and do the editing manually

Doing the editing manually is exactly what I want, but I also want to record takes without hearing all of the previous takes.

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

If you heal the splits or move them to reveal the MIDI that's been cropped out of existence, you'll find it's all still there.

As I said....

13 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I was able to salvage the first 2 takes by deleting the newly-created clips and dragging out the remaining clip edge to reveal the MIDI notes (fortunately still there), but this seems like a lot of trouble and risk to go to (especially if it happens multiple times) and I'd rather just prevent it from happening in the first place.

I've brought up similar issues in the past with Cakewalk/Sonar's recording modes, getting splits that I didn't ask for and other oddness, with both MIDI and audio recording. One of the questions that I've never gotten an answer to is "why is Sonar making these splits in the first place?" If I understood the logic behind it, I might be able to avoid it, or at least it would seem less like the program is fighting me. Since the behavior looks arbitrary (to me), I have a hard time working around it.

From the way people talk about it, it seems like Sonar is designed to do that, automatically make these splits at certain points.

Does the program assume that I always want to make an edit at the beginning and end of a newly-recorded clip? So it tries to help by making splits in all the existing clips?

I can't find any description in the documentation of how these automatic splits are supposed to fit in a workflow.

4 hours ago, reginaldStjohn said:

You can always "heal" the split clips by swiping across the whole take with the smart tool.

That is not working here. When I swipe across either in the top half of the clip (I-beam cursor) all it does is select the clips, when I swipe across the lower half (comping cursor), it selects them, unmutes them, and mutes all of the clips in the other lanes. No healing.

In neither case does it stitch the clips back together. The only thing that works is deleting all but the leftmost clip in the lane, then dragging the remaining clip's right edge out until the notes are restored. This gets tedious when I have to do it for multiple takes. It gets out of hand quickly with a higher count of takes.

It's not just a matter of tidiness, if I don't get it right I can wind up with truncated notes as well as duplicate notes sounding simultaneously.

I know how swipe-to-heal is supposed to work because I do it all the time with audio takes. It doesn't work for MIDI takes. At least not for me. I tried swipe-selecting all the clips in a lane and performing a Bounce to Clip, and that was even worse, all of the clips in that lane vanished.

[Sock Monkey]

As I’ve said before. For midi all you need is 2 tracks. The instrument track and a midi track. Between the two and sound on sound  you can create almost anything that you want. 
After spending time in few other Daw’s midi editing functions I can only say Sonar rules them all. Cubase a not so close second. 

[David Baay]

2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

One of the questions that I've never gotten an answer to is "why is Sonar making these splits in the first place?"

I've answered this question in the past, but maybe not for you. The assumption when comp recording is that a new take is intended to replace some or all of the previous takes in that that were presumably inferior in that section, so it automatically makes splits in all the other clips and mutes them. If you subequently decide that one of the earlier takes is in fact superior in that section, one click promotes that other clip. If only one part of it is better than some previous clip, you can always swipe with the Comp tool to break up the section further and promote the appropriate clips for each. The automatic splits are just intended to facilitate the work of replacing not-so-good material with better material.

A long time ago, not too long after comping and comp-recording was implemented, I posted a "Take the MIDI Comping Challenge" demo project that had a set of raw takes with no comping and a comped set in another track showing the goal. That goal was achievable only by an excrutiatingly complicated series of comping moves, but was easy to obtain by manually editing MIDI the old-fashioned way. One of the Devs chimed in confirming my conclusion that the Comping workflow was not intended for MIDI and was generally not suited to it in many cases. 

As for swiping (or Ctrl-clicking selected clips) with the Comp tool to heal the splits, my recollection was that this would work for MIDI if you had Non-Destructive MIDI Editing enabled so that the clips are abutting. If NDME wasn't enabled, the empty space between notes would be cropped away so the clip boundaries were no longer abutting and couldn't be healed. That said, I just checked this and it already wasn't workng in Platinum 17.10 so either it never worked and my memory is faulty, or it got broken way back.

I wouldn't have noticed because I never try to Comp MIDI. 😜

EDIT: MIDI comp split healing worked in X3. IIRC, that's when comping was implemented.

Edited February 12 by David Baay

[Starship Krupa]

52 minutes ago, David Baay said:

I've answered this question in the past, but maybe not for you. The assumption when comp recording is that a new take is intended to replace some or all of the previous takes in that that were presumably inferior in that section, so it automatically makes splits in all the other clips and mutes them....

....The automatic splits are just intended to facilitate the work of replacing not-so-good material with better material.

Yes, you have answered it for me, but only in regard to audio takes. And for audio takes, it makes sense (not that I wouldn't love to be able to switch it off as in Sound on Sound recording, but that's another matter).

I was specifically trying to get clarity on how it works for MIDI. Although they mostly work the same, there are some important differences that I'm trying to sort out.

52 minutes ago, David Baay said:

That goal was achievable only by an excrutiatingly complicated series of comping moves...

....One of the Devs chimed in confirming my conclusion that the Comping workflow was not intended for MIDI

I can only defer to their greater understanding and agree that as currently implemented, it doesn't appear to be suited for MIDI. What I was experiencing was a feature, just one that doesn't work as well as it might.

52 minutes ago, David Baay said:

was easy to obtain by manually editing MIDI the old-fashioned way

This was actually my goal. I want to record a series of takes, in loop mode and/or one at a time, and then edit the parts into one finished part, by doing manual cut, paste and copy moves on the clips, along with individual note editing and drawing in the PRV.

I wasn't recording MIDI in Comping Mode because I wanted to use the Sonar comping workflow on MIDI data, I recorded in Comping Mode because I didn't want to hear the previous takes.

Now, thanks to your input and assurance that yeah, it's supposed to work that way, it just doesn't do it in a way that accomplishes what I want to do, I've worked out a method for doing what I want to do.

My solution is to record the first, looped takes in Comping Mode. This way, previous takes are muted, and the notes are within nice, full-width clips. Then if I want to do a shorter take, I switch to Sound on Sound and mute the previous lanes (oh Smart Swipe, how I do love thee) before recording.

Simple, no hassle. I suspect that if I were to flip back into looped recording, I would run afoul of the automatic clip split feature.

57 minutes ago, Sock Monkey said:

As I’ve said before. For midi all you need is 2 tracks. The instrument track and a midi track. Between the two and sound on sound  you can create almost anything that you want.

I always use separate synth and MIDI tracks when working with MIDI. While I understand the value of the Simple Instrument track type in keeping things....simple, whenever I tried to use one I somehow always wound up splitting it anyway. And yes, Sound on Sound Mode is now part of my MIDI workflow.

57 minutes ago, Sock Monkey said:

After spending time in few other Daw’s midi editing functions I can only say Sonar rules them all.

I concur. Sonar does MIDI so well (with a couple of exceptions cough drum maps cough) I was puzzled as to how things could go so pear-shaped. Turns out it's a feature, not a bug; I was using it incorrectly.

Edited February 12 by Starship Krupa

[David Baay]

4 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

My solution is to record the first, looped takes in Comping Mode. This way, previous takes are muted, and the notes are within nice, full-width clips. Then if I want to do a shorter take, I switch to Sound on Sound and mute the previous lanes

I do everything in sound-on-sound mode with manual lane-muting as needed. I also seldom use loop recording as it can also be unsuitable for MIDI recording because if you hit a note a hair early at the end of one take instead of the beginning of the next, it gets truncated. Another place where a little AI is needed.

[David Baay]

A quote from my "MIDI Comping Challenge" post back in 2013 on the old forum (from a super-secret members-only subforum [wink, wink, nod, nod]):

"Ultimately, though, I think the answer is that you just can't  (and don't need to) comp MIDI in the same way that you comp audio, and that the classic methods of editing MIDI - fixing bad pitches, velocities, start times and durations directly and selectively copy-pasting where needed - are likely to work better in most cases.
 
But since the tool exists, and I'm a MIDI guy, I thought I should give it a go. Maybe over time it can become smart enough to work as seamlessly and intuitively as audio comping."

[Starship Krupa]

2 minutes ago, David Baay said:

I also seldom use loop recording as it can also be unsuitable for MIDI recording because if you hit a note a hair early at the end of one take instead of the beginning of the next, it gets truncated. Another place where a little AI is needed.

Until such time as we relinquish control to our AI overlords, I usually make my loop section a bit longer than it needs to be in order to help avoid this.

MIDI recording seems to get more fidgety the further I get from doing one take at a time and stopping in between, but hey, gotta love those editing tools!

[David Baay]

Just now, Starship Krupa said:

I usually make my loop section a bit longer than it needs to be in order to help avoid this.

That doesn't really keep you from hitting a note early and having it end up truncated at the end of the previous loop pass, though. 

[Starship Krupa]

12 minutes ago, David Baay said:

But since the tool exists, and I'm a MIDI guy, I thought I should give it a go. Maybe over time it can become smart enough to work as seamlessly and intuitively as audio comping.

I think that it could work better than it does now with even some small changes.

When doing splits using the Split Tool, there's an option to "split any underlying MIDI notes when you split clips, and insert MIDI chase events (such as continuous controllers, Pitch Wheel, and Patch Change) at the split position."

Assuming that this works as advertised, perhaps it could also apply to the automatically-created splits that Sonar creates in Comping Mode.

edit: Hmm, I just tried that and it didn't work the way I expected. Of course, my expectations for this seem to be out of whack with how things actually are....

Edited February 12 by Starship Krupa

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, David Baay said:

MIDI comp split healing worked in X3. IIRC, that's when comping was implemented.

It doesn't seem to be working in Cakewalk Sonar. But you say it used to work?

Really, if it worked the same as with audio clips, that would help a LOT.

Sounds like a fresh bug report is in order?

[David Baay]

13 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Sounds like a fresh bug report is in order?

Yes. You want to do the honors? Just tell them it worked in X3 and was already broken in Platinum 17.10.