Drag a note so the beginning is at a known position?

This might be too arcane for most folks .. but in platinum, as far as I can tell, there is no way to drag a note and know where the beginning of it is going to land.    So it takes much more mousing than should be necessary.  
 
(edit) :) Immediately after posting I found one way, first comment.   Dumb and blind me.   Other good ways welcome, too, though!
 
But maybe someone will show a better way.   If I'm going to drag, say, to a quarter note triplet, a fairly common thing -- in PRV the mouse CURSOR has a continuous reference number up at the top, but you are not allowed to grab a note by the beginning of it, so the cursor reading has very little value -- the cursor is somewhere in the middle of the note.   
 
It would be really good either to be able to grab a note exactly at its beginning OR to somehow have a read-out of where the beginning is located at every moment --- bars, beats, and ticks.   
 
The result is that I drag notes to approximately the right place, visually against the grid, and then mouse to the beginning of the note and check the read-out, and it it is too far off, go back to the middle of the note and grab it again, and watch very closely adding to eyestrain to make sure my new movement is not too big.  
 
Better ideas?   I thought of changing the grid frequently, as appropriate -- doing it by mouse clicks takes too long, but maybe I could assign shortcut keys to common grid positions ...  but it's also visually disorienting, and a quarter-note-triplet grid in 3 4 time is awkward anyway.

Sounds to me like you need to dig into how to create advanced "Snap" settings. I am not fully following what you are attempting to do but if it's in proper musical time then you should be able to adjust your grid/tempo/time sig and Snap settings to accomodate.
 
This, just like tempo, time sigs and beat divisions (and alterations like triplets and dotted notes and whatnot) in "real world" theory can get quite complex.
 
You may actually have an easier time doing such things in the Staff View for those types of sections (by which I mean triplets and the like). Those will be reflected in the PRV AFAIK.

jpetersen
Turn off the smart grid function to go back to "normal" snap-to-grid, and just select the resolution you need.

+1 I am not a big fan of "Smart Grid". I have it turned off on all my projects. Set the grid resolution (max 1/64) and snap in PRV  high (max 1/128) - either straight or triplets, and you should be in pretty good shape. (NOTE: With a high grid resolution, you may need to expand the PRV horizontally for the grid lines to show).

Huh ... I'll try it.   I turned off "Aim assist" so long ago I had forgotten it existed.    It does work -- it shows where snap will land, and when snap is off, it shows where the note beginning is located.   
 
Not a pleasing thing to have two different cursor-like vertical lines moving around, but yes, that might be good.  
 
For anyone else, "Aim Assist" is under the top level "Edit" menu, and it seems to be persistent -- does not save with a project, and if you change it for one project you've changed it for all, until you change it back again.  
 
On a big monitor, like so many things, it's nearly invisible --- CW really needs to buy big monitors for their programmers, so they see how tiny some of the things they program can appear to the users. 
 
 
 

williamcopper
Oh God .... turns out 'aim assist' differs depending on whether you click slightly to the right or to the left of the center -- of a potentially tiny and imprecisely clickable midi note.   Kill me.   NOT A GOOD DESIGN.

 
I should have known the result of answering your question with a perfectly reasonable answer that addressed your issue wouid be serial posts complaining about the implementation, rather than a "thank you."
 

Long ago I posted this feature request:  NO, none not ever, nope, don't do it, no NONE NO zones on midi notes.

 
Thankfully, Cakewalk had the good sense to ignore it. I can only imagine the nightmare of shortcuts and menu options that would be required to change the functionality of a single mouse click or click and drag compared to deploying selective positional context. 
 
As to "tiny notes," you really should learn how to use zoom. I don't mean the basic zoom you think you know, but the many options you clearly don't know. I do tons of work that involve major zoom ins to work on millisecond and sometimes even individual sample changes to the attacks of audio or MIDI, then immediate major zoom outs to locate the next section that requires close-in zooming. There are many ways to do this.
 
And if you want everything bigger, learn how to change your monitor resolution, or use a second monitor with low resolution and park the PRV in there. I often do super-detailed synth programming where I want a bigger
"target" so I can move faster on making fine parameter adjustments...many synths can be difficult to read, so I just park the synth in the secondary monitor with lower resolution while I'm programming.
 
Best thing that ever happened to me in terms of visuals was getting a 28" touch screen as my primary monitor and setting it up in front of me like a mixer.
 

CW really needs to buy big monitors for their programmers, so they see how tiny some of the things they program can appear to the users.

 
Seriously, you don't know what you're talking about. They use big monitors, I've visited their offices. However, they also know how to use the program.

You can't beat a boofhead with words of reason, only a club.

Screenshot shows the unfortunate effect of Aim Assist -- now there are 5 cursors visible.   Not really helpful!   Only one of them is 'real' but it's not easy to tell which one without a focus-detracting click-around.   Actually the picture shows 5 cursors, there are really six -- the mouse arrow does not get picked up in screen shots.  
 

 
 

Well, if you take the two 'Now Time' markers out (both of them are correct, as confirmed by the duplicate versions of Now Time in Track View and in the control bar), then there are three bad or at least contradictory cursors  -- or four, counting the windows mouse arrow again.