Tracktion Software

frankvg · Post by **frankvg** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 3:33 pm

You can either select midi notes and use the transpose button in the properties panel or put a 'midi modifier' (Tracktion plugins) on a track and transpose all the midi clips.

tonedef71 · Post by **tonedef71** » Mon Mar 09, 2015 3:48 pm

frankvg wrote:You can either select midi notes and use the transpose button in the properties panel or put a 'midi modifier' (Tracktion plugins) on a track and transpose all the midi clips.

Ah, these techniques sound elegant; I look forward to trying them out the next time I fire up Tracktion.

Thank you for helping out a newbie Tracktioneer; coming over from Cakewalk Sonar, I am still developing my intuition for Tracktion!

iwokojance · Post by **iwokojance** » Sat Mar 21, 2015 3:07 pm

Anyone else having problems with the T5 32bit update for windows (version 5.4.3)? Every time I try to install, I get an error saying the drive path is incorrect, or I don't have permission...but I have full permissions on all files on my computer. Is it possibly a corrupt file?

nathanscribe · Post by **nathanscribe** » Sat Apr 18, 2015 9:02 pm

iwokojance wrote:Anyone else having problems with the T5 32bit update for windows (version 5.4.3)? Every time I try to install, I get an error saying the drive path is incorrect, or I don't have permission...but I have full permissions on all files on my computer. Is it possibly a corrupt file?

Me too. I'm on 10.7.5 on a 2011 Mini i5 w/2GB. When I try to open it, I just get the message "Tracktion cannot be opened, it should be moved to the trash".

And the problem is, I can't re-install the previous version either. So I had to use Time Machine to revert. Lucky I had it.

What's going wrong?

rlindsey0 · Post by **rlindsey0** » Sun May 03, 2015 10:17 pm

I would say T6 needs a better way of denoting tempo. Right now, AFAICS, bpm is understood solely in terms of quarter notes. This works a lot or even most of the time, but there are a number of meters for which it's not the best choice.

For example, I have a song in 6/8, in which each eighth note goes by 210 times per minute. Since 6/8 is usually (though not always) felt as two main pulses per measure, with triplet subdivisions, the sensible thing to do would be to allow the user to denote the dotted quarter note as the tempo unit and set the tempo at 70 bpm. That is, dotted quarter = 70 bpm. This is fairly standard on written scores. (And also let the user decide whether to have the click play the subdivisions or not.) Failing that, you should at least be able to set the denominator of the time signature (ie, the eighth note) as the tempo unit. That is, eighth = 210 bpm.

But Tracktion won't let you do either of those things and instead forces you to use the nonintuitive quarter note = 105 bpm. I say nonintuitive because in this kind of groove, the quarter note is not the unit you count by. You count by the dotted quarter or, at slower tempos, the eighth note, not the quarter. Consequently, thinking in terms of 105 bpm makes no sense for this song.

Yes, you can make it work, but it's a kludge. I could even have set the song as 2/4 or 4/4 and clicked the triplet option, but that's a kludge too.

So to sum up, the request is to let the user determine what note value will constitute the "beat" in "bpm"--eighth, quarter, dotted quarter, half, dotted half, etc. Let the quarter note be the standard default, as now, but provide the option to change it.

Sorry for the rant, went on longer than I'd planned....

gigazaga · Post by **gigazaga** » Mon May 04, 2015 12:37 am

rlindsey0 wrote:I would say T6 needs a better way of denoting tempo. Right now, AFAICS, bpm is understood solely in terms of quarter notes. This works a lot or even most of the time, but there are a number of meters for which it's not the best choice.

You can change the time signature.

1. Put the cursor at the beginning of the Edit.
2. Click on the Tempo track header.
3. In the Properties section, click "New Time Signature Change"

From there you can enter most common time signature and select what type of note gets the beat - 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32. You can actually put these time signature changes anywhere you want during the song.

rlindsey0 · Post by **rlindsey0** » Mon May 04, 2015 12:42 am

I know that; I do it all the time. With respect, you missed my point entirely. The point was not about how to change time signatures in a song, it was about tempo and how it is computed in relation to non-quarter-note-based time signatures.

gigazaga · Post by **gigazaga** » Mon May 04, 2015 1:31 am

rlindsey0 wrote:I know that; I do it all the time. With respect, you missed my point entirely. The point was not about how to change time signatures in a song, it was about tempo and how it is computed in relation to non-quarter-note-based time signatures.

I understand now. I am not in a position to test it tonight. But what you are reporting must be a bug.

rlindsey0 · Post by **rlindsey0** » Mon May 04, 2015 3:13 am

gigazaga wrote:
rlindsey0 wrote:I know that; I do it all the time. With respect, you missed my point entirely. The point was not about how to change time signatures in a song, it was about tempo and how it is computed in relation to non-quarter-note-based time signatures.
I understand now. I am not in a position to test it tonight. But what you are reporting must be a bug.

Hmm, not sure if it's a bug. I suspect that the programmers either didn't realize this could be an issue or just didn't place a priority on making the tempo feature as deep as it ought to be. AFAIK, Tracktion has never been able to do what I'm suggesting. I just think it *should* be, because this limited functionality hinders usability, at least for some of us.

I know you "wrote the book" on Tracktion, and so undoubtedly know it much better than I do. Perhaps there's just something obvious I'm missing. Wouldn't be the first time.

frankvg · Post by **frankvg** » Mon May 04, 2015 8:21 am

Certainly not a bug but a limitation of Tracktion. It also isn't able to correctly translate a midi file with a dotter quarter note. Which I think it should! But do you know of any host that does? Logic doesn't either.

frankvg · Post by **frankvg** » Mon May 04, 2015 8:39 am

Did a quick search and I believe DP is able to do this. With this in mind we should extend the FR with a suitable click pattern for the time sigs. So for instance with a dotted quarter note set to 70, alternate bars 6/8 (with a click of a dotted quarter) to 7/8 in which the subdivision can change from 3+2+2 to 2+2+3, etc. Probably a non-trivial task to implement.

rlindsey0 · Post by **rlindsey0** » Mon May 04, 2015 10:48 am

frankvg wrote:Did a quick search and I believe DP is able to do this. With this in mind we should extend the FR with a suitable click pattern for the time sigs. So for instance with a dotted quarter note set to 70, alternate bars 6/8 (with a click of a dotted quarter) to 7/8 in which the subdivision can change from 3+2+2 to 2+2+3, etc. Probably a non-trivial task to implement.

Yes, that would be quite useful.

EDIT: I also now see that I really should have put this in the T6 FR thread, since AFAIK no further development is being done on T5....

Tracktion Software

KVR Audio

T5 bugs + FRs