I’m back to update and revise my comments on this topic and to confirm that the Snap anomaly being described here does in-fact exist.
I was recently setting up a mastering session for songs which I mixed myself in Cubase 10.5 when I noticed that the mixes were SNAPPING TO UNEXPECTED VALUES.
I recently upgraded from Cubase 8 to 10.5 and I have NEVER encountered this behavior until I upgraded.
My best guess was that there was a change in the new Cubase export functionality and there was something in the metadata of the WAVs I was exporting that didn’t need to be there.
For many decades I only used AIFF, which as everyone probably knows does not include any metadata. This could be another reason that I never encountered this anomaly. But I honestly believe that it did not exist in Cubase 8, which had the older export functionality.
In the video below you will see me import the songs to Bar 2. Many of them have seemingly random Snap points and do not snap to Bar 2 as I intended. I have not verified this yet but my hypothesis is that the songs that DID snap to Bar 2 were exported from beat one of a BAR. The ones that did not snap to Bar to were exported from either a BEAT or QUANTIZE value. meaning that my left locator was placed at some value OTHER than beat one of a Bar.
So, I went into the export dialogue and noticed that “Insert iXML chunk” was enabled. I disabled it and exported one of my mixes again.
Then I imported the newly exported song into the mastering session and the Snap was at the top of the audio, it snapped to Bar two. Same song. You can see I amended the title to “test No iXML”.
So, it appears, presently, that the iMXL data contains the Snap value data.
THEN, I imported all the songs to the mastering session again but dragged them all to Bar1 Beat1. The files snapped to Bar1 Beat1 and the S anchor was there as well. So, a temporary work-around for folks who are receiving WAVs for remixing should always drag the files to Bar1 Beat1. That will solve the “random snap value” anomaly for files which contain metadata that’s problematic. I use the term “random” very loosely for now because it appears that this problem is not necessarily random but a byproduct of unnecessary metadata on WAV files.
If you want to be totally free of this anomaly, ask your clients to deliver AIFF.
I’d also like to point out that the Snap point is not available on the arrange page. Only from inside the Part editor. Hopefully this is another preference I have turned off somewhere. Otherwise, I think that’s a problem as well that could be making this issue even more elusive and frustrating. Again, I don’t remember this being the case in Cubase 8.
All that said, my opinion that, snaps falling to a quantize or Bar value when punching on the fly is the correct behavior, still stands.
This is a cursory experiment. There may be other variables to consider.