Any cons to having long sequences where you only use the first four bars?

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S Righteous
S Righteous Member Posts: 148 Helper
in Maschine

I'm using Maschine Plus. I've exported some midi files from logic, which is a pain - separate rant, but Logic has made external midi use more cryptic over the years.

Anyway, in the Maschine, I end up with really long patterns, to get the 4 bars I want. Since there is no way to truncate a pattern, I set all the grid to full bars, and nudge those events to the beginning of the pattern and set the length to 4 bars, when it was originally 120+ bars.

So, these patterns are fine, I'm only playing the first four bars of them. But in the background, I believe Maschine thinks these are massively long patterns. If I forget to select a note - that note is still sitting out on bar 124, so it keeps everything in memory.

Is there any CPU or downside to having these really long patterns? I'm not sure I want to go through all the work of copying the events into new patterns, but I will if it makes things more efficient - I just have zero insight into how Maschine handles this stuff.

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  • D-One
    D-One Moderator Posts: 2,884 mod
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    I don't think there's any overhead to having tons of MIDI notes that are never read / played by an instrument; too much MIDI only takes more CPU in terms of the amount of polyphony, since many notes at the same time make the instrument work harder.

    I think you can make that MIDI transferring process easier by clicking the individual 4 bar MIDI clips in logic and selecting export>MIDI... Instead of exporting the whole song. When importing into Maschine the last note of the MIDI dictates the length, (It seems MIDI files have no length value stored?), it's easier to clean up a 2-bar pattern that should be 4 rather than a 150-bar pattern that should be 4.

  • S Righteous
    S Righteous Member Posts: 148 Helper
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    Thanks for the info.

    For now I won't worry about the excess empty space after my 4 bar patterns. I will dig more into exporting midi from logic, they seemed to have changed this since I was last doing that regularly.

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