Issues with opening Piano Roll

Hi all,

I'm running into an issue whenever I bring up the piano roll on a selected region already containing midi information. It's not a huge deal, but it seems like most of the time, whenever it is pulled up, it is not actually focused on the selected region. Either it will be somewhere else in the timeline, or won't be vertically centered on the notes I want to go in and edit. Either way, I almost always have to scroll around and take time to find it.

I never seemed to run into this problem before, I'm thinking maybe since I updated is when I started noticing it. I'm sure there's a setting somewhere I'm missing. Any help? I'm running v 10.5.1.

Thank you!

By content link icon, do you mean the yellow icon with the chain on it within the editor window?

If so, that has been checked.

I've attached a few screenshots that somewhat illustrate my problem. It is sometimes much more severe than this, but I couldn't get it to reproduce that at the moment. The way it happens feels very random and without rhyme or reason to me, or maybe I'm missing something huge.

I included one img that shows the behavior I'd like every time which is having the content centered in the piano roll (preferably automatically zoomed so it all shows). The other two images show a very mild version of when it appears out of whack. A lot of the time, the content will be nowhere in view though.

From your screenshots, whenever a region is selected, that is what we see in Piano Roll.

On your 2nd pic, no region is selected, so nothing is showing in piano roll.

What should it be doing in your view?

From your screenshots, whenever a region is selected, that is what we see in Piano Roll.

On your 2nd pic, no region is selected, so nothing is showing in piano roll.

What should it be doing in your view?

Look closer. In every pic, a different region is selected.

In the Piano Roll menu bar, is "View > Selected Region" checked?

Just looked. "View > Selected Region" is checked.

Look closer. In every pic, a different region is selected.

I know. So when you select the regions you want, do they show up?

Interesting: I started doing some tests to check the Piano Roll's behavior and couldn't find a rhyme or reason for what part of the region you select it decides to show you. It seems to make... no sense at all. One thing I noticed is that the Piano Roll will not display the same part of a region depending on which other region you selected just before. But even that behavior isn't entirely consistent.

My workflow is nearly always to make sure no notes are selected (click the background or press Shift-D if necessary) then press Z to see all the notes inside the region I'm working on.

Look closer. In every pic, a different region is selected.

 

I know. So when you select the regions you want, do they show up?

They always show up. The problem is, a good percentage of the time, the viewer for the piano roll will be showing in a completely different part of the timeline when I bring up the event window for a selected region. Or sometimes, like in the pictures, it will show just a portion of the region content instead of zooming in or out to show all of it and center it, or it will be in the correct place time wise, but I'll have to scroll vertically to find the content of the selected region.

The behavior I'm looking for is essentially this:

I click on a region that has some existing midi notes and data and then press "E" to bring up event window for the region.

The event window pops up and has all of the content within that region centered within the editor window, zoomed appropriately to fit.

I used to work with ableton and it would behave the way in which I liked. When I first switched over to Logic, it seemed to behave the desirable way, but lately, I've been having to scroll over half the time to find the content. Does that all make sense? It can put a big damper on my workflow when I constantly have to do that.

Interesting: I started doing some tests to check the Piano Roll's behavior and couldn't find a rhyme or reason for what part of the region you select it decides to show you. It seems to make... no sense at all. One thing I noticed is that the Piano Roll will not display the same part of a region depending on which other region you selected just before. But even that behavior isn't entirely consistent.

 

My workflow is nearly always to make sure no notes are selected (click the background or press Shift-D if necessary) then press Z to see all the notes inside the region I'm working on.

Huh, that's very interesting. The weird thing is it seemed to work great when I first started on logic a few years ago. I almost feel like this problem started after I did the most recent update.

I'll go ahead and give your work around a shot and see if that works for me. Thank you for the tip!

Interesting: I started doing some tests to check the Piano Roll's behavior and couldn't find a rhyme or reason for what part of the region you select it decides to show you. It seems to make... no sense at all. One thing I noticed is that the Piano Roll will not display the same part of a region depending on which other region you selected just before. But even that behavior isn't entirely consistent.

 

My workflow is nearly always to make sure no notes are selected (click the background or press Shift-D if necessary) then press Z to see all the notes inside the region I'm working on.

I tried pressing shift-d, but that didn't seem to do anything for me. What hotkey mapping do you have Shift-D assigned to?

Ah got it. Do you know of a hotkey command to switch between the arrange window and the edit window?

Like say the event window is already open. I click on a new region, now it the event window moves to show that region, but it's not centered. If I try doing the hotkey for "deselect all" at this point, it will deselect everything in the arrange window as opposed to the event window. So maybe there is a key command that shifts focus from the arrange to window or vice versa?

If I could have a sequence of key commands to press every time, it would be way preferable to always having to go to click down in the event window.

Alex - thanks for posting this. I've been wondering about this myself for months and thought I was going crazy. It's such an inconsequential thing that it's difficult to troubleshoot because you can't know what changed or what to call the issue you are troubleshooting! I concur with David that there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason why the piano roll does what it does at this point.

Posting here just to keep an eye on this to see if anyone else has any other workarounds

Yes!! I have never been able to get this to work properly, and this issue drives me crazy. It's up with my top Logic annoyances, together with the flawed zoom/autozoom behaviour. If you are listening back to your tack, the song position has moved on, but you select a midi region and open the piano roll, Logic almost never reliably shows the content of that region. What is the point of showing an empty piano roll window, how would that ever make sense? if I have selected a midi region, and hit P, what else could I possibly mean, other than "show me the midi for this region"? Also, the bar number that displays in the piano roll, often is neither the current song position, nor the bar position of the region, it just seems to be random.

The behaviour I want is: Dear Logic: please completely ignore the current play position, and whether Logic is playing or not, just ALWAYS show me the midi of the selected region when I open the piano roll editor". There are similar quirks with opening the Audio Editor on selected audio regions - often the first press of W does not show the waveform, if you then close it, and press W again, on the 2nd attempt, the audio waveform appears.

Longtime user of Logic and I can attest that somewhere along the way this behavior changed. I swear Logic used to be 100% reliable in this area. 'Link' button was the only variable and if it was yellow it always worked.

I feel the same way. It feels like it started happening for me with 10.5

Need to test it more but it appears that double clicking on a region reliably opens the region with the notes in focus every time (i think lol). Just dont double click on a region that is already selected as it will then close the piano roll.

Interesting, I'm finding different behavior when I double click on regions. I've never done it like that and am just used to pressing E. Still coming out a bit wonky for me sometimes either way though.

Thanks for the feedback alexwnbrg

a couple more thoughts

-make sure you have 'horizontal auto zoom' enabled on the right by the zoom sliders.

-unchecking 'Region Transpose'. notes not coming into view if they are in a different octave if I had tranposed the region as a whole in the arrange seems to be a bug too.

-'auto set locators' in the cycle submenu (right click) had some effect as well although I dont really work that way (i think of it as 'the protools way' linking selection and timeline playback or whatever).

Thanks for the feedback alexwnbrg

a couple more thoughts

 

-make sure you have 'horizontal auto zoom' enabled on the right by the zoom sliders.

-unchecking 'Region Transpose'. notes not coming into view if they are in a different octave if I had tranposed the region as a whole in the arrange seems to be a bug too.

-'auto set locators' in the cycle submenu (right click) had some effect as well although I dont really work that way (i think of it as 'the protools way' linking selection and timeline playback or whatever).

Yo, this fixed my problem, activating the horizontal auto zoom. I think I've been frustrated by this setting having gotten deactivated in some previous update, and been dealing with it for months/years. THANK YOU!