Put on your Thinking Caps - Want to Automate Stopping a loop Recording mid-loop

Cubase
1

I’ve got a theory about why when Recording multiple Audio Takes while Looping, Cubase incorrectly calculates the Audio’s Tempo. To test this out I want to make a series Recordings while Looping. Each of these Recordings would be for different lengths - for example 2 loops exactly, 1.5 loops, 3.25 loops, etc.

While this would be pretty easy to do by manually stopping the Recording at the desired time, the recording’s length wouldn’t be as precise as I need - i.e. manually stopping a Recording after 2.5 times through will be close to two and a half times but not exactly. So I’d like to be able to Automate the stop.

If this were a non-Looped linear Recording Automating the Stop is easy enough. But I can’t figure out how to make it stop midway through a multi-loop recording. You can’t use a Punch-Out as that would end the Recording on the first time through the Loop. One key limitation is while a Recording is occurring there are a lot of settings Cubase won’t let you change until the Recording is done. For example you can’t start Recording with Punch-Out disabled and then enable it mid-recording.

Any ideas how to approach this?

2

No idea if this would work - but what happens if you put a punch-in at the beginning of the loop and a punch out at the stop point?

3

The problem with that is the length of the Audio recording would be limited to the Loop length or less.

4

Just so that I can understand better, while we’re looping, say we first have a cycle of 2 bars. IF we had a way to immediately (well, not a need to be of ms accuracy here, we have “plenty” of time to do this, since we care about the right locator), would it be enough to simply readjust this locator (right) to 1.5 bars?

5

In theory that makes sense. But turns out that is one of the things you can’t adjust while recording is in progress.

A couple of approaches I suspect might be useful (even though I’ve no clue how)

  1. Somehow exploit the ability to have a 2nd independent Loop in the Key Editor
  2. Use a virtual MIDI cable to trigger a Stop via Generic Remote. which should have the same limitations as using the Punch-Out, but perhaps that could be managed outside of Cubase
6
  • Maybe the STOP could be triggered by a MIDI note on a separate MIDI track (which gets looped back into the Generic Remote)
  • But that MIDI track is muted at first, and gets manually unmuted during the desired cycle.

This would allow for imprecision in unmuting, while the STOP event ends up being precise.

7

That might have potential. I’ll give it a try.

Sorry for the delayed reply, just got back from traveling.