Editing MIDI in PRV - MC4
OK, I'm following up on Herb's one quote from Jimmy Buffet "If we didn't all laugh we'd go insane". Yup - no where is this more necessary than in this absolutely insane hobby we have all taken up....... My latest brush with sanity occured yesterday -
Just when I thought I had MC4 and MIDI PRV editing figured out, I lost about 3 hours worth of work yesterday and I'm still not totally sure what went wrong. I figure I'll describe it here in case it happens to anyone else. So here we go:
I used Studio Instruments as a soft-synth into MC4, to bring over an el. bass part for a song I was working on. So I got a MIDI and an Audio track by default; and it plays back just fine. I worked with the MIDI file over the course of a couple days, making a lot of changes to note pitches, added more notes by copy-n-paste, etc. Standard PRV editing. At one point, I bounced that track down to a standard audio track - sounds fine. It was still incomplete, had only about half the song done and I still had a few notes a bit rough and was adjusting their duration and timing.
So yesterday I decided to go back in and try to fnish it up. I have that mixed-down audio track muted, and am working in the MIDI track in PRV edit mode. I do a few copy and pastes of some measures... continue on with editing. At one point, liking what I heard played back, I sat back and was actually pleased with it and about ready to mix it down again to audio. So, I hit W and played it back from the beginning of the song. To my dismay, I heard a bunch of garbage notes in the MIDI track near the beginning; upon close examination of the MIDI notes, I saw that numerous "pastes" of sections had duplicated themselves overtop the notes already present at those times.
I tried several times with the erasor tool, to go in and delete the excess notes and clean up the track - only to find that each time I did a Save of the project and go back and play it, the garbage was back IN the track again! Ultimately, I threw up my hands and deleted both the MIDI and synth audio tracks, keeping only the one good mixdown audio track in the project. I plan to avoid doing that kind of PRV editing again and to use direct keyboard recording instead. But, it doesn't make sense to me what happened, so I wanted to document this in case anyone else has this experience.
notes: I'm always careful during editing, to first do Select/none, then Select from here, Select until there... and then click at the left margin of the track I want, to highlight only that section. When pasting the section in, I always carefully check the correct track number and time section it gets pasted in. So I don't see how this happened; secondly, I am wondering if the track in question needs to be deselected as a "goove" track before safe editing can occur?
-John