Long Note Durations

Why Doesn't Cakewalk Stop Playing at the "End of File" Mark?

If you have loaded a Standard MIDI File (.MID) that was created in another sequencer, either (external hardware or PC based software), there may have been a problem converting it to Standard MIDI File format. Certain programs will write a very long duration to a single MIDI note. Although this problem mostly appears on percussion tracks with very short durations, it can be present on instrument tracks as well. Cakewalk thinks of this huge duration as a note-on event. Without a note-off event, Cakewalk will continue to play until it reaches the end of the note-on duration.

Suggested Work-Arounds

Event List

You can verify this by clicking on Mark | Select All. Open Cakewalk's Event list and check each note for an absurd duration, like 546:015. If you see a long duration like this, change it to something reasonable (30 ticks) and play the file back. It should stop at the end.

Hint: An easy way to find events with long durations is to use the Go To | Search feature on Cakewalk's Control Bar. Open the Event List view, click on Go To | Search. Use the Event Filter to search for note durations greater than the value of the longest note in your song file. The cursor will jump to the location of the first note it finds within your search criteria.

Event Filter - Edit | Interpolate

Another way to quickly check for this problem is to use Cakewalk's Event Filter. First determine that you have no events with a duration of 100 beats. Then, click on Edit | Interpolate. Press the "Nothing" button and put an x in the "Note" box by clicking on it. In the "Duration" MIN box, type 100:000 and in the MAX box type, 546:015. Press OK. This will "Search" for all note durations between 100 beats and 546 beats. Click OK. In the "Replace" filter, type 30 (ticks) in the MIN and MAX boxes.

Your .MID file should now correctly stop at the last measure.

Copy and Paste

If you prefer not to use the Event Filter to scan for long durations, you can simply copy the entire song and paste it to a "New" blank Cakewalk .WRK file. This will usually solve the problem because sometimes there are invisible parameters present in MIDI files created by other programs that are unrecognizable by Cakewalk.

Earlier versions of the auto-arrangement program Band-in-a-Box exhibited this long duration problem. The bug has been fixed so that Band-in-a-Box no longer writes excessive durations to saved .MID files. Please contact PG Music for an updated version of the program.

This problem has also been reported when saving .MID files from external hardware sequencers such as the Korg 01/W FD, Roland SC-35 Sound Brush, and others.

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