MIDI: Possible to edit time values for groups of notes?

[Michael McBroom]

I'm using the staff view as I'm editing a piece I'm working on. I have one track of half-note chords that I want to change to whole note chords. Well, most of the chords, at any rate. Currently, I've found two ways to accomplish this. First, I go through each chord, right click on each individual note, and manually change its time value to 4:000. This is the slow way. A slightly faster way is just to write the new chord in whole notes next to the old chord, then delete the old chord and drag the new one into the old chord's position. Haven't figured out yet how to drag the whole chord, so I'm still dragging individual notes. It ends up being noticeably faster than method one, though. Perhaps an even faster way that I just now thought of would be to insert a new MIDI track next to the existing one, write the new chords in it, then delete the old track. Yeah, I'm gonna give that a try. If I were a keyboardist with decent sight-reading skills, I could just sit down at my MIDI keyboard and knock this out in a couple of minutes,  but sadly my keyboarding skills are rudimentary.

Still, it would be nice if I could just click on a command somewhere and state the change I would like to perform to a group of notes. It would be even nicer if I could perform this command on the entire track, with the ability to exclude any of the chords on the track that I want from this command. I have used the audio "Fit to Time" command for just this sort of thing, but it appears that there is no MIDI equivalent.

 

Edited December 27, 2019 by Michael McBroom

[scook]

The Event Inspector operates on selected notes. This thread discusses velocity

but it also can change note duration.

[user 905133]

ooops

 

Edited December 27, 2019 by User 905133

[mdiemer]

Another way to do it is with the Length procedure, under Processes. But it works by percentages. So, if you want to change all the notes by 30%, you put in 70%. Half would obviously be 50%. It can get tricky, so I keep the calculator handy. but it works.

[Michael McBroom]

I tried playing around with the Length command, but it didn't do anything for the MIDI tracks. I just assumed it was for audio only.

[scook]

The Event Inspector supports a several ways to including percentages, ticks and the time used in the OP

 

[David Baay]

Length is usually used for changing whole clips, but should work on individual notes or selected groups (200 percent to go from half to whole notes). As scook says, the Event Inspector will also accept percentages or durations in M:B:T format.  Edit > Select by Filter may also be useful if you don't want to change every event in the clip.

EDIT: And related ot Select by Filter is Edit > Find/Change, which can both select and change events to the desired duration.

Edited December 28, 2019 by David Baay

[RBH]

The Event Inspector is  a very efficient way to accomplish either track or global project  midi edits, - as well selection and group edits.  It's a midi editing super weapon.

 

[RBH]

Just to add to the bag of tricks - I discovered a way to select notes from the PRV velocity pane that I didn't know existed. Maybe it's been there for 20 years - but hey I can be a little slow on the uptake sometimes. 

I found that I can right click and swipe right to left to lasso notes of certain velocity value ( much like setting the transform window ) and this will select just notes of those velocity value ranges. This proved really useful for running a Cal routine of a group of mid level velocities that I was able to pick across the entire track. I used it to run the vary velocities to randomize velocity values for a drum sampler with a high count of multy samples.