I have not really thought this through so I apologize if I am overlooking something simple but I noticed something when testing out the piano roll draw tool.
If you have “snap” enabled and you bring your cursor into a grid box, if you slowly drag mouse to the left, the pencil cursor will enter the grid box but the note indicator box remains in the grid box on the right, the cursor can go to about half way before the note indicator box connected to the cursor shows up in that grid box to the left. I would think where the point of that pencil cursor is pointed to, the note indicator would show up in that grid box.
Hopefully this makes sense, if this is not a mistake then please let me know why this occurs.
For clarification I assume by “grid box” you mean “midi region” and by “slowly drag mouse” you mean “slowly move mouse” (with no button pressed).
I think that’s just how snap is supposed to work, the note indicator is not visible because it is snapped beyond the rightmost boundary of the region, this gif demonstrates what you describe and what happens when you click with the note indicator hidden:
Thank you for responding to many of my posts.
Yes you are right not sure why but I used poor choice of terminology for this post, but your assumptions are correct.
Also I think you are right that could make sense, that it is holding to the snapping of the line until it reaches a certain point to the left. When I was first analyzing this I was thinking of this similar to how when you have a program where you can arrange tabs by dragging and it only swaps the tags at 50% into the other one (which is probably why I used the word “drag” by accident).
Anyways, I don’t know, just something all of sudden feels a little different when drawing notes in the piano roll, then I rememember when last testing Ardour, probably just me.
You explained what was happening in your gif, but weird because it looks like you are drawing notes from right to left
Once, Ardour had two “snap modes”. One was just called “snap” and worked as you describe. The other was called “magnetic snap” and worked by allowing free movement except when “near” the snap points.
After several years of supporting both, we removed the non-magnetic snap. What is called snap today is what we used to term “magnetic snap” - free motion until the mouse pointer is close to a snap point.
Ahh, okay, that is unfortunate, I appear to be batting 0 here.
Only good thing is that I am not crazy for noticing this. When describing this I was going to make a comment that it feels like you guys have strengthened your magnets but didn’t want to sound foolish. Turns out I am not so foolish, well at least in this case anyways
Thank You for your response
@Paul
Just to clarify I understand the decision, less to maintain and also less confusion rather than having multiple tools that have similar functionality. The “snap” tool you guys went with was the clear choice out of the two. I was just thinking that sometimes it might be nice to be able to just freely click inside the “boxes” (that horizontal note lines + vertical measure lines create) almost like how there are step sequencers that allow you to click to turn boxes on / off.
The problem with this is that the drawn grid is not fixed but depends on zoom level - another change we made after user feedback, when we used to always draw a “fixed” grid.
Right now, the distance between vertical grid lines is not always 1 beat, even if the grid is set to 1 beat. Consequently, “fill the (visual) box” will not always do what you expect.
Instead we use the grid size and/or a manually specified note duration. And that Just Works.
Thank you very much for your response Paul.
For anyone reading this in the future, the percussive mode diamond markers also help with a step sequencer feel (if using for drums) can be found in tracks context menu. These work very well with the snap setting as well.
