Can't change project tempo and time signature without scaling content of MIDI clips.

[Yulian]

Hello!
First of all, I'm really grateful to Tracktion Software for a great and affordable Waveform DAW!
Here is my situation.
Spontaneously, I had a need to record a midi piano, based on a previously saved mp3 file with a metronome and drums.
The problem is that I didn't remember the tempo of this mp3 file since I wasn't at home.
Therefore, before recording, I did not set the appropriate tempo in the project, and left the standard 120 BPM 4/4. I just added this rhythm file to an empty track, and recorded several other piano tracks with it.
When I brought this recording home, I found the tempo of an mp3 audio file with a metronome to apply to the project in which I was recording a midi piano.
It was 103 BPM 6/8.
I unchecked "Remap on Tempo Change" on all my midi takes and changed the tempo.
The length of the midi clips themselves has indeed remained unchanged, but the length of the notes within the clip has been changed.
No matter what I did, I couldn't find a setting that would give me the ability to change the tempo of the project without affecting the length of midi notes in midi clips.
If there is a way to do this, I would be very grateful if someone could tell me about it!
If this is not possible now, I kindly ask Tracktion Software to add such a feature. I think it would make midi processing even more flexible.
I also noticed that for some reason I can't uncheck "Remap on Tempo Change" for multiple midi clips at the same time, only individually.
That being said, I can do this for any number of audio clips at the same time.
For clarity, I am attaching a video demonstrating these situations.
Thanks in advance for any help!
If you also experienced some inconvenience related to this, but could not solve it, please also write about it!

My config:
Waveform Version 12.1.8 (currently latest)
OS Windows 7 Max
My old PC: AMD Athlon(tm) II X3 450 (3.2GHz), RAM 10GB DD3, Graphic AMD Radeon 6670HD, SSD HyperX Fury 480G

[Yulian]

It seems to me that this problem is that in Waveform the length of a midi note is measured in beats, not absolute time.
This can be seen if, for example, you create a project with a tempo of 60 BPM 4/4, and add a midi clip with one note, 1 beat in size. The actual length of this note will be equal to one second. You can see this by right-clicking on the timeline and choosing Timebase > Seconds.
But if you change the tempo to 120 bpm, the length of the midi note will still be one beat, but in units of absolute time it will be 0.5 seconds.

I recorded a musician's performance using a pre-prepared backing track with a metronome as a click, tempo set to 103 BPM 6/8.
But at the same time, the standard tempo of 120 BPM 4/4 was set in the project.

Unfortunately, because of this feature, I can't now take my midi project and just change 120 4/4 to 103 6/8, or copy the midi clips into the project at 103 6/8 tempo, because all these actions are accompanied by an automatic change in the recording speed (length of midi notes)...

[Peter Widdicombe]

I think I would EXPECT that behavior. If you record something with, say, 4 quarter notes in a bar and sped it up, I would still expect 4 quarter notes to be played, faster or slower, but not to have overlapping or gaps. If doubling the tempo, I would not want all my quarter notes becoming half notes ?

[pough]

I doubt you'll find a way to really fix your problem, since MIDI seems to be inherently beat-based. However, you might be able to get close to what you want by stretching the MIDI clips. Hold down Alt and drag the rightmost arrow on a MIDI clip. It stretches the clip and notes within it.

[irpacynot]

I know this may be an ignorant thing to say (which wouldn't surprise me, being the noob that I am), but I wonder if simply unchecking the "snap to" button could solve the issue.

[Yulian]

Thank you for your responses! I was aware of the stretching function by holding Alt and dragging the edge of the clip. Although I thought that I would hardly be able to manually stretch my clip by eye so that it exactly coincided with the new timeline. But thanks to your answers, I got an idea. As a result, I was able to stretch my clip very precisely to compensate for the speedup when changing the tempo and time signature.
Here is a small mathematical algorithm that I had to calculate using a calculator)

103 * 2 / 120 = 1.7166 (how much faster a midi clip recorded at 120 bpm 4/4 sounds faster in a project with 103 bpm 6/8)
03:51:146 - Length of one of the recorded midi clips
3 * 60 + 51 + 0.146 = 231.146 seconds (length of clip recorded at 120 BPM 4/4)
231.146 * 1.71666 = 396.8006 (clip duration multiplied by acceleration value at 103 BPM 6/8)
396.8006 / 60 = 6.6133 (seconds to minutes conversion)
60 * 0.6133 = 36.798 (conversion of numbers after the decimal point from thousandths of a minute to 60 seconds)
06:36:798 - New clip length, which should be instead of 03:51:146

Surprisingly, but it worked!!!) I only had to pull my midi track back a little, because the notes on it did not start from the very beginning of the clip, this place, when the musician listened to the countdown to the intro, also stretched a little.
Of course, this is not the fastest and not the most convenient way to solve the problem, but still, it worked, and I'm glad for it)

I still really hope that in the future there will be an opportunity to automate such recalculations!

[Yulian]

I know this may be an ignorant thing to say (which wouldn't surprise me, being the noob that I am), but I wonder if simply unchecking the "snap to" button could solve the issue.

Do you mean the "Snap" button on the bottom right panel? Unfortunately not, this button only enables/disables snapping clips, notes or markers to timeline strips...

[irpacynot]

I know this may be an ignorant thing to say (which wouldn't surprise me, being the noob that I am), but I wonder if simply unchecking the "snap to" button could solve the issue.

Do you mean the "Snap" button on the bottom right panel? Unfortunately not, this button only enables/disables snapping clips, notes or markers to timeline strips...

Hmm...I see. Well, I do know that when I import an audio clip the software will ask if I was to start it at a particular place or lay it at the current position. I wonder if you simply rendered that one (or however many) stem and brought it back in as a WAV/FLAC file if you could then maintain its original timing.

[Yulian]

I wonder if you simply rendered that one (or however many) stem and brought it back in as a WAV/FLAC file if you could then maintain its original timing.

Yes, this seems to work as well. You can stretch the midi to the size of the rendered audio track. But this is not very convenient, especially if I have a lot of midi tracks. For each of them, I will need to do an audio render...

[Yulian]

I found another problem with midi processing at time signatures other than 4/4. For example 4/8 or 4/2 when the beat note changes.
If I render a track with a midi clip to a new track at 4/4, it will be the same clip in length and content.
But if I do the same at 4/8 or 4/2, then the content of the rendered clips is either doubled or slowed down.
I recorded a demo of this problem.

[Watchful]

We also previously documented Waveform can't handle 7/8 time, I believe, although it could in previous versions.

[Yulian]

We also previously documented Waveform can't handle 7/8 time, I believe, although it could in previous versions.

Hmm, that's weird, I haven't encountered this problem yet, thankfully) I tried setting 7/8 in an empty project, it seems to work the same as with other time signatures with different number of beats per bar.

[irpacynot]

We also previously documented Waveform can't handle 7/8 time, I believe, although it could in previous versions.

Seriously? Yeesh. When it comes to slightly abstract time signatures, 7/8 is kind of a go-to.

Again, pretty new, still, to the software. Do they do periodic updates to fix stuff like that?

[Watchful]

Yeah, at least in previous version. V12 has been sadly lacking in both support and updates.

Dark Lane discovered trying to import a 7/8 MIDI file that Waveform was having insurmountable problems with it, which I confirmed by trying the same file. I was able to open it in other DAWs just fine. I had no trouble with 7/8 imports in previous versions. I suspect something broke when FigBug pretty much recoded the MIDI engine from scratch for v12.

To Yulian's question, it might be different *creating* a 7/8 project from inside Waveform, however.

[Yulian]

Dark Lane discovered trying to import a 7/8 MIDI file that Waveform was having insurmountable problems with it, which I confirmed by trying the same file.
To Yulian's question, it might be different *creating* a 7/8 project from inside Waveform, however.

I tried to import an external midi file with notes created in MuseScore 3 in 7/8. I also managed to do this without any problems. Perhaps it has been fixed? Or perhaps the file that Dark Lane was trying to import was exported with some parameters that the new Waveform MIDI engine couldn't read.

By the way, I really like how the tempo and time signature settings are done in MuseScore. There, these parameters are independent of each other. No matter how I change the time signature, the speed of the composition will remain the same. The speed will depend only on the tempo value and on the note that is indicated next to it. If the tempo is 60BPM with a quarter note, that would be exactly 60 quarter beats per minute. If the tempo note is an eighth, then there will only be 30 quarter beats per minute.

I already made a similar topic, but apparently I formulated it poorly and therefore did not receive an answer)

To my regret, there is still no such thing as a tempo note in Waveform, but I really hope that this will be changed in the future!) Do you think this change could make working with midi more convenient? And not only with midi, but in general, with the organization of projects. Perhaps the more opinions are expressed, the more likely the developers will pay attention to it.