I was living with this but causing me lots of issues, and I finally think it’s really a bug.
If you have perfectly quantised 1/4th, 1/8th, 1/16th notes (i.e. no DQ required, all notes start/end quantised), sometimes 1/16th notes appear as 1/8th, and sometimes they don’t.
To reproduce:
New Project
New Midi Track
1/4, 1/8, 1/16 notes in midi - last note (the D) should show as a 1/16th in the score.
From now on, changing the length of the note in midi does correspond to a change in length in the score:
As far as I can see I have no way of knowing whether the 1/16th note will appear as a 1/16th or be interpreted as an 1/8th. In a large score it wouldn’t be practical to have to manually force all of them to 1/16ths. I’d just like to enter a 16th and see a 16th.
This is expected. The score editor interprets the raw MIDI note durations according to context. If there are two 16th notes then those will both be shown as 16th notes, but a single 16th followed by a rest will by default be rounded up to an 8th with a staccato. The intention is to create a clean notation representation of the MIDI data, and so it tries to avoid creating situations where you end up with multiple rests.
If you really require a 16th in this context then setting it as a 16th from the score editor toolbar is the way to do it.
There isn’t currently a ‘literal lengths’ option, but I will make a note of this request.
Notation should follow the composer´s intention.
A clean representation is something a composer can take care of in the next step, if he or she feels the need to do so.
Literal mode - a big vote for this. The choice of 8th vs 16th is entirely relative to the tempo and style of the music. At lower tempos you are more likely to hit 16th notes in my kind of music - just as much as an 8th in another style. So I don’t think a heuristic chosen on a particular note length can work longer term.
Also, not quite sure I understand the avoidance of multiple rests. A 1/16 rest followed by an 1/8th rest for me in the scenario above would be completely fine.
Is there a bug? Above I show a scenario whereby sometimes it follows the rule as you outlined, and sometimes it reacts in literal mode. Isn’t that inconsistent and possibly a bug. Right now as a user I don’t know which way Cubase will treat the midi so I’m forced to check both midi and score to see if they are consistent - quite an issue for a large piece of music.
Appreciate anything you can do on this or any workarounds you can think of.
#1 - that’s something we can consider in the future
#2 - The reason for the seemingly-inconsistent behaviour is that when you set a note duration in the score editor then that property is written into the note and the display quantization logic uses that rather than the raw length of the MIDI note so that you can adjust the start and end.
However, consider the case that you copy and paste some notes in the key editor from one part to another and then modify them. eg copy from a treble track to a bass track and drag to make the 8th notes into whole notes. You open the score editor and everything is still showing as 8th notes because that property is set, which is not expected (and in most cases is not desirable). So what happens is that if the MIDI note length is changed by more than a factor of 2 then the notated length field is ignored.
And useful to know about the midi copying - although I wish we could see some of that invisible overlay stored in midi notes, e.g. in the midi list editor.
Now that I understand what’s going on I have figured out a workaround that I can use while waiting for literal mode. I’ve made a simple Logical Editor preset to select all 16ths in midi then I can force them all to be 16ths in the score at once. Seems to do the job so far in quick tests.
