Hi, could anyone tell me if setting a track to Musical on the ‘toggle timebase between musical and linear’ button in the track list is the same thing as activating ‘Musical Mode’ for an audio part or event in the Sample Editor? Many thanks!
No, it´s not the same, hence the different names…
No, it’s not. Similar names but different functions.
Musical Mode affects audio only. You activate it per file, whether in the editor, Pool or Infoline. It makes the audio file play back following the project tempo.
Musical and Linear Timebase affects the events and parts on a track. With Musical, events are locked to bar numbers. Linear timebase locks events to time, e.g., minutes:seconds.
Thanks for your reply Steve - so does toggling between Musical and Linear Timebase affect playback of an event (ie by physically moving an event to adjust to a change in tempo), or does it just alter how the event is represented on the grid?
It affects both, of course. Read the sections in the manual about it, or play with it a bit. I experienced a learning curve with this, but it was due to my preconceived notion about the terms.
Try this: Set a track to Linear Time Base set the tempo to X, place an audio file on the time line and slice it up.
now change the tempo.
Now set the track to Musical Time Base and change the tempo some more.
It does physically move the event in relation to the absolute bar / time postion, but not time stretch it to adjust it to a tempo change.
That’s really helpful - thanks!!
FWIW: You’re not alone in your confusion.
‘Linear Time Base’ strikes me as a lot like those military or NASA-style acronyms… needlessly complicated. I dunno if it’s a German v. English deal or an engineering thing.
This is one of the many areas in Cubase where simply changing the nomenclature would help comprehension/retention a -lot-. (Well for -me- anyway.)
…also, why there is the same ‘Musical’ button on multiple tabs in the Audio Editor. And even simple stuff like what colour indicates ‘on’.
Another example: all the variants on ‘Warp’, ‘Tabs’, et al. made me mentally check out -years- ago.
See, every once in a while, the ‘Warp’ will ‘do’ something and for example, the length or position of the event will change position and it’s not clear to me -why- without reviewing all the ‘options’.
If I can’t ‘grok’ it just by looking at it? I often move on. I know there’s a lot of eye-rolling with that attitude as ‘lazy’, but users expect more self-evident functions nowadays. IOW: as software has become more complex, the onus is now on developers to reach out to dumb users, whereas in the past, it was more reasonable to expect users to ‘master’ all the intricacies of the tools.
Don’t forget this caveat in from the operation manual:
“Internally, events on musical time based tracks use the same high precision for positioning (64 bit floating point values) as linear time based events. However, switching between linear and musical time base results in a very small loss of precision (introduced by the mathematical operations used for scaling values in the two different formats). Therefore you should avoid switching repeatedly between the two modes.”