Basically, the issue is that if you change the global song tempo, the playback cursor jumps around, seemingly randomly. So, if you're playing your song back, and you tweak the tempo while it's playing, the audio or MIDI will skip during playback! Or, if you're editing a specific section of a song and you modify the tempo by any amount, you will have to side-scroll and find the correct song position again.
I've tested this in my other DAW, Reason 11, and Reason plays back perfectly in sync while changing the global tempo, with no audio or MIDI skips at all.
I've been told this is not a bug by Presonus support staff, but I really can't think of any reason why this would be expected behavior. Is it to support video editing? It seems to keep the correct TIME position during tempo changes but not the correct BAR position. (That would explain the jumps on tempo changes.) Regardless, it sure would be nice to have an option to turn that behavior off so that if we're working in Bars mode (not Seconds) we can have audio that doesn't skip if we change the tempo. To me, this seems like a really big bug.
There's a lot of valid reasons why one would change the tempo, and I can't think of why the cursor position would change. If you set the cursor at Bar 4, and you change the tempo, why should the cursor move anywhere? It's at Bar 4, just leave it there. Bar 4 may play back faster or slower after you change the tempo, but that's the only thing that should change.
Below is the bug report I've submitted. Hopefully you agree that this is something that should be addressed.
Thanks...
====================================================
When changing tempo, the playback position changes in an unexpected way. When the tempo changes (by editing the Tempo field next to the transport controls), the playback position jumps to a seemingly random location.
Steps to recreate:
1. Load any song that has at least 10-20 bars' worth of music.
2. Make sure the timebase for the ruler and the transport is set to display in Bars.
3. Set the tempo to 100.
4. Set the playback cursor to bar 10 (10.01.01.00 to be exact).
5. Change the tempo to 110 exactly, by entering into the field on the transport and pressing enter.
Expected behavior:
Song position should not change (and stay at bar 10.01.01.00)
Actual behavior:
The position marker jumps to almost to Bar 11 (10.04.03.40).
You can get more drastic position changes the more you change the tempo (see attached PDF for examples)
| tempo |
playback pos |
|
|
| change from |
changes from |
|
|
| 100 bpm to: |
Bar 10 to: |
|
|
| 50 |
5.03.01.00 |
|
|
| 75 |
7.04.01.00 |
|
|
| 100 |
10.01.01.00 |
(no change/reference value) |
|
| 101 |
10.01.02.44 |
|
|
| 110 |
10.04.03.40 |
|
|
| 120 |
11.04.01.80 |
|
|
| 130 |
12.03.04.20 |
|
|
| 150 |
14.03.01.00 |
|
|
| 175 |
16.04.01.00 |
|
|
| 200 |
19.01.01.00 |
|
|
NOTE: this happens during playback as well, which as you can imagine, is VERY confusing. I was recently doing minor tweaks to the tempo during playback and it was very disconcerting to have the playback jump all over the place!
Environment info:
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Studio One 5.4.0.66465 Win x64 (Built on Sep 8 2021)