Hello!
Can someone tell me why my playhead/notes are only able to move to these discrete positions?
When marking transients, or aligning certain midi notes/regions/etc, I need a more-smooth ability.
I’m thinking the solution here is probably super simple, -something obvious I’m just missing…
(I’m using Ardour 8,6,7 on Mac OS X 10.11.6)
Thank you!
-J
Do you have snapping enabled?
Nope, as you can see in the gif, top-left.
I spent about 30min trying most everything I could think of, looking through preferences, etc…
I seriously don’t know why it’s happening.
I am able to “Nudge” the playhead forward or backward by whatever samples I set it to Nudge by, but when I then re-click on the playhead, it immediately springs-back to the nearest one of these discrete increments. 
It doesn’t happen in older versions I have by the way (-I checked Ardour 6, for example).
Are you using an official build?
Yes, for 8.6.7, on Mac OS X 10.11.
Soon I will probably upgrade my machine to the latest version of Ardour, and maybe like macOS 10.15 or something close to that. Hopefully this problem will go away then… But until then… 
I’m using 8.7 on Linux so it could be something specific to your version/OS, have to wait for someone else to chime in.
I’m still having this issue in the new Ardour 8.12, and it is very annoying as I try to manually position certain midi notes with sample-accuracy.
It seems to be occurring now at increments of either 11 or 12 samples, which you can see at the top of this new GIF:
Can anyone help me or explain this behavior?
Is this only a macOS thing???
If someone who’s on a Windows or Linux version of Ardour 8.12 could zoom all the way in on a waveform and try this and get back to me, that would be greatly appreciated.
Needless to show, but obviously this is what it should look like.
Ardour 6.9 (32-Bit):
… Edit:
Okay, wow, making some progress here… 
Under Session > Properties > Misc > Miscellaneous Options, I changed “Default time domain” from “Musical (beats) time” to “Audio (wallclock) time”, and this gave me smooth playhead motion(!), and smooth audio regions sliding. However, notice how midi notes are still moving in bigger increments:
I will keep experimenting…
-J
In Ardour, MIDI data always has timing information in musical time. It is theoretically possible to have MIDI files that have times that use video frames for time, which is conceptually similar to audio time in the sense that it is tempo independent. However, we do not support this, and have no plans to do so.
Yes, I now see that the midi notes within regions have always been bound to “musical time”, relative to each-other. However, in Ardour 6.9 you were still able to slide the midi regions themselves with single-sample precision:
Why was there any reason/need to change this behavior?
Does this have to do with that big bug where midi-notes/regions would be ‘trimmed’ if too close to a beginning boundary (or something similar)?
It seems kind of crazy to me that universal, sample-accurate placement/triggering/precision wouldn’t somehow be a built-in option. But hey, I’m not the one slaving-away in C/C++, so I’m sure there are other, vast things I’m not considering… 
I just need my manually-positioned midi notes to go exactly where I want them w/res to another waveform. That’s all I’m trying to achieve. So, perhaps I can get Ardour 8.12 to subdivide the “musical time” further to better approximate a single sample of allowable positioning?
Anyway, thanks @paul 
and thanks to anyone else for any suggestions!
Yeah, so I just set the tempo of the project to 1000BPM (-the max.).
The allowed subdivisions are now considerably smaller, ~1-3 samples.
That will do for now. 