I know it all depends on timebase settings and whether or not the musical mode is on, but on short samples I can’t even turn the musical mode on.
On the attached .gif you can see what I mean. When the musical timebase is selected, the samples stay in the right place in relation to a new BPM, but they get lengthier, resulting in overlapping audio events, which I don’t want. And when in linear timebase mode, the audio gets moved away from other items that use the musical timebase.
I just want the items to behave like they do in the musical timbase mode, but without the event stretching.
I think you want to do this by inserting a Tempo Track into your project; (do this before you import or tempo modify any audio tracks). You can write automation to the tempo track that instructs the entire project to change tempo as you specify.
The thing is - the events do not stretch. You just shorten the time span between events if you raise the bpm and thus they start to overlap.
You can see it better by changing the ruler to “Time Linear” before changing the tempo.
Can you elaborate on this - do you get an error message? Not having your Sample in Musical Mode is what’s causing this behavior. I don’t think small samples can’t be in Musical Mode, but I’m not totally sure, so I’ll have to check.
Make sure that the samples’ Audio Files have a value in their Tempo Field in the Pool. You can’t streach based on Tempo if you don’t know the starting Tempo.
Your samples should behave the same with both a Fixed Tempo & a Tempo Track.
It’s not an error message, I’m simply clicking on “musical mode” and it doesn’t do anything, I also can’t even set the sample tempo in the audio pool (when I try to change it and press “enter” after entering the value, it doesn’t change it, it goes back to “???” Or something).
That sounds like you might not have Write permissions on the file. Try looking at the file’s settings in the OS. Are you on a Mac or PC (I only know PCs)?
Does this behave normally on other Audio files? If it’s only this file, where did it come from?
Can you modify the file in other ways, for example the Sample Editor. Can you copy it & if so does the copy have the problem?
Really? Interesting. I wonder where the cutoff is?
In that case the OP should Render the whole series of clips into a single long Audio File. In the Pool set that to the current Project Tempo & Musical Mode. Now that should shrink & stretch with the Tempo.
Wow. This is extremely unintuitive and confusing for a DAW to do this in 2025. Even FL Studio handles this pretty much automatically, kinda unacceptable that a software widely marketed as “professional” requires some weird workarounds, because “you can’t set BPM in some hidden window because the sample is too short”. So far it seems like for every action that requires two mouse clicks in most DAWs, Cubase requires 10 clicks + 2 hours of troubleshooting. Sad.
Again, what you describe as stretching is just events remaining at their length while you change the display.
You wrote that you don’t want stretching, which is confusing to me, as I think you don’t want graphical stretching. That would result in actual time stretching being applied. Not sure if you’d be ok with that.
And while I know that it is quite normal to put a lot of kick drum samples onto a track directly you could also load the sample into Drum Machine and work with MIDI events on a drum track instead. All your issues would be gone in an instant.
Yeah, this is the easiest approach. Although I’d go with a Sampler Track instead as that seems the simplest to me.
Also like Johnny said your Samples are not stretching, they are staying the exact same length. They only visually appear to stretch because as you change the Tempo the zoom level is also changing. Try the suggestion of adding a second Ruler set to Minutes & Seconds rather than Bars & Beats - you’ll find that if the Sample was a half second long when you started it will still be a half second long after changing the Tempo. If the Samples were to adjust like you want they would also sound different - which may or may not be what you want.
I agree it can be confusing, but that’s because it is designed to accommodate a variety of different needs - especially those of media composers and their need to exactly match timing cues. Perhaps this will help clarify how this all fits together. You situation I’d think falls in the upper-right quadrant of the 3rd chart.
