Bitwig • Re: Why Bitwig ignores compound times?

Now, I understand what you're asking. And permit me to beg your forgiveness for missing your point earlier. I was answering from a music theory understanding, but your questions are more from the integration angle.

I'm honestly glad you got my point No problem! I was feeling impotent because that's what happens when I can't manage to express what I'm thinking But fortunately there was a way to achieve the communication.

However, as I've recognized before, I wasn't aware of the wide "beat" treatment and, specially, as the lower numeral of the time signature, so I can understand the confusion.

And anyway, thanks to this I could not only understand better the problem, but also get more music theory concepts, like the beat-level one. This will help me to think in a more clear way when reading and talking about it. As they said in Life of Brian, always look on the bright side of life whistle whistle

if one has written a piece that uses shifting time signatures throughout with all values of the beat relative to the quarter note remaining constant, this "archaic" approach actually becomes something of a boon to the compositional process, as it produces the correct tempo throughout rather seamlessly.

I see. To keep tempo constant if changing the lower numeral of the time signature in the same project, keeping a "standard beat base" makes it easier. I think that's a good shot.

Also, I've thought that if the reason is not logical (from the point of view of making it easier for users with "standard" —or "classic"— music theory only), then it could be adaptative / retrocompatible. It seems that working with the quarter note as a base is part of the MIDI standard (protocol made in 1983, they were too far to our age where DAW's are so powerful, as you mentioned). And because the DAW developers always think of the users of the prior version (or prior DAW, or prior sequencer), then... they want to keep that line nowadays, forty years later. This also could avoid wrong MIDI communications between DAW's and/or with any MIDI device (because that protocol didn't change the quarter note base since then).

This is taken from a webpage about how to process MIDI files (developers stuff):

(...) A Time Signature is two numbers, one on top of the other. The numerator describes the number of beats in a Bar, while the denominator describes of what note value a beat is (ie, how many quarter notes there are in a beat). (...) However the Set Tempo meta event can change these defaults. As MIDI only deals in quarter notes, the Set Tempo meta event also only deals in quarter notes but also gives the time signature. (...)

In fact, it seems that the tempo of the MIDI protocol is based instead on the length of a quarter note (according to the number of what they call "ticks", the real time unit for MIDI).

(...) Delta times are stored as ticks, so what we need to know now is how many ticks make up a quarter-note. This is given in the header of the SMF as Ticks Per Quarter Note.

(...)

microseconds per tick = microseconds per quarter note / ticks per quarter note (...)

source of both extracts: https://majicdesigns.github.io/MD_MIDIF ... iming.html

I'll check DAW manuals a bit more and ask DAW's support just in case I can have a confirmation. But as said, your shot and the MIDI thing make sense.

Cheers!

Statistics: Posted by bronxio — Sun Jul 21, 2024 11:01 am

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