Is there a reason why these macros work perfectly in Cubase Pro 13 but not in Nuendo 13? I got Nuendo today and I followed the same steps to get this great functionality back. But it acts really weird.
The macros that expand, instead shrink the selection. How much it depends on which macro. The only macro that actually expands the section is the 2x, but it doesn’t really expand 2x, more like 1.2x and also makes the notes 2x longer, so that part it does it correctly, but the expansion it doesn’t.
And the ones that compress, they do weird things. None of the macros behave perfectly as they do in Cubase, which is weird because Nuendo is basically Cubase Pro with a lot more features, but MIDI functionality is the same.
Could it be perhaps some preference that is different? I used the profile manager to export my Cubase preferences to a file that then I imported in Nuendo. And then I checked this thread to remember all the places that I had to put these files and the folder, and it’s all in the respective locations but in the Nuendo folder instead of the Cubase one.
Hard to tell. The funny thing is that I made these macros in Nuendo. But obviously with customized settings. For me everything is perfect, I even bound it to mouse wheel and it became extremely efficient.
Are you sure that all macros and logical presets are exactly the same (didn’t corrupt)?
As you can see, the notes themselves become twice as long, so that part works fine. But also you can see that they are very close together, not going all the way to bar 20, which is what should happen.
Sorry man, I meant to reply to this much earlier today and then ADHD took over.
There’s no problem, it was behaving that weird in a specific project, I have no idea why, because it’s not like it’s one of those with the tempo detection that makes a mess and sets every bar to a different tempo. This was constant tempo, but somehow it was doing all that weird stuff.
But then I opened another project and it’s behaving as good as usual, so maybe that project has something weird I would need to dedicate time to figure out, which is the thing I barely have any of.
So all good here, thanks again for the magnificent set of macros that really saved me a lot of time. We should have some kind of repository here for the great things people here do. I have a few things that I have collected over the year and few months since I started using Cubase that help me quite a lot every single time I use Cubase and now Nuendo.
Off the top of my head, there’s the one someone made for me, or told me how to do, I can’t remember because it’s been too long. But it’s one of the best macros to save time in Cubase, because basically Cubase doesn’t have that thing Logic Pro has to make sure the window holding the instrument belongs to the track you have selected. It’s a shortcoming that it’s hard to understand, but someone made a great macro for that, so now if I have too much clutter, I press Cmd+Shift+F16 and every window that holds a sound effect or an instrument (mixers stay put) disappears and the only one left besides the mixers is the instrument that belongs to the current track. I have probably used that by now hundreds of times, and it could possibly be over a thousand. Super useful.
There are a few things here like presets for the Logical Editor and other things that we should keep around in this forum in a thread, the files along with the step by step on how to install it and use it.
These macros in your example are half and double timing which is not what you want, from what I read, you don’t want to change the timing of the notes or their position at all, just the length they sustain is that right? So in the actions part of the PLE don’t choose position or anything like that; just length.
The macros that riflinka setup do more or less what I need, just differently from the way you do it in Logic Pro or even in Cubase when you do it in the main program window by setting the pointer to stretch.
Meaning, it stretches the selection, or compresses it. This will not always abide to the rules of bars and quantizing, but it’s useful even if to save time by not having to do all that stretching manually.
No, that’s not what I want. It’s like for example, grabbing an audio file and stretching it 200% so it plays at 50% speed. Or compressing it to 50% length so it plays at 200% speed. That, and all the percentages in between or over them.
Ok, and if I’m reading between the lines here, you want the pitch to go down and up with it as if you were doing it on a turntable? That’s the only other option there is from what I know. You can double or half midi notes as shown in the green by yourself, or the length as I’ve just posted, but time stretch the EACH note relative to the start and end of the section you’re doing,…
Not at all, but I can see how I confused you with my analogy to an audio file being compressed or stretched. No pitch change, just the length of each note. This macro provides a workaround for a feature that Logic Pro has and Cubase doesn’t, or at least not a simple way, because in Logic Pro you can simply select the notes, press Shift+T and you will see that two handles appear at the left and right of the selection. You just grab the handles and shrink the notes or expand them to whatever you want.
Cubase offers this but in a more complicated way, which is that you have to chop the MIDI event around those notes in the main window, then choose the stretch pointer and then you can drag the end or beginning of that new event that you created and compress it or stretch it.
The end result is the same, but the way Logic Pro does is easier and faster. Usually it’s the other way around, Cubase is the best DAW there is for MIDI programming, but it’s not perfect.
I still don’t understand to be honest, you want to slow things down and speed them up, but without the time increasing or the length of the notes changing, I think this can easily be done, I use logic as well but I can’t understand what you’re saying, what the end result is, if you had 1 bar of 4/4 with a note on beat 1.0.0 and on 1.3.0, both 1/4 long, what do you want the end result to be?
Try using the Time Stretch tool on a MIDI Part in the Project Window. This is the function that is being asked for, but for a selection of notes inside the Key Editor.
I also discovered that it will not scale correctly if you are using a Tempo map. This is what caused all these problems.
The temporary solution is to mute the Tempo track before stretching notes.
Also I’ve found out a much easier way to do this, I will try it later.
This is how it is done in FL Studio and it should be available in Cubase too without any logical editors! Such a simple and useful thing. I didn’t even know I needed this before I tried FL Studio.
My biggest confusion after almost two years of using Cubase Pro is what exactly does the “Sizing applies time stretch” tool does in the key editor. Maybe it’s something that goes above my current knowledge of music and MIDI programming, but when I try it out, resizing selected notes with either the normal sizing or the time stretch variant produces the same result.
And I mean, not just visually, I have applied different instruments to the track after drawing several notes and quantizing them. Whether I enlarge them using Normal Sizing or Sizing Applies Time Stretch, there’s no difference in how they sound. The note is longer, so it plays longer depending on the instrument.
However, the group of notes is not stretched at all, only the notes are in place. I’m very surprised about this omission in Cubase, because it’s a DAW that excels at everything else, especially MIDI programming. There are so many functions that other DAWs don’t have, but it lacks this basic functionality.
Even though it’s been a few months sincne this was asked, let me try to explain what it does.
Up to and including Cubase 12:
Time Stretching applies to Note Expression data. Most people don’t use Note Expression (NE) thus they never stumble upon this.
Example:
A note
…and some NE added to it
Since Cubase 13:
The above is still valid.
Additionally we can now use time stretch in the Key Editor’s part display to perform the same kind of time stretching there as we can do in the project view.
