MIDI export ommiting random chord notes?

Thanks for the quick follow-up.

Yes, it is still causing the problem. Right now I only have Bitwig Studio at hand, but I tried importing a file in a friend’s house in Ableton, less than a week ago, and it was still happening.

It only happens in the harmony track export; I don’t recall it ever happening on the bass note track or on the melody track. And it only happens on “common notes”: if a chord has a note in common with either the next or the previous chord, that note is a strong candidate to disappear.

Here’s a screenshot of it in Bitwig. I’ve exported this harmony in 1/4s mode so it can be clear which notes it’s missing, but obviously when just exporting plain chords you have to figure them out for yourself.

As @HertzDevil pointed out, some programs can handle the NoteOff event happening before the NoteOn event and automatically fix it, but a lot others don’t. I’m guessing Logic Pro X does.

Right now we have a check in place that verifies that note off events do not occur after the subsequent note on event (we thought there might be some sort of round off error). A simple thing we can try would be just to shorten the duration of every note by a small amount (so that it wouldn’t appreciably change the playback). I can make the change now, but it will likely be combined and pushed up with the next minor release. I’ll follow up with you at that time to make sure that this is fixed.

Thank you Ryan. I’ll be waiting warmly.

@CDEFGAB and all users who were experiencing dropped notes in the chord section of MIDI export, I’m sorry I forgot to repost here, but there have been two separate updates to the export function of Hookpad that should address these issues.

The net effect is that Hookpad is now truncating the durations of notes exported to MIDI to ensure that the timestamps of end-note MIDI events are strictly less than the start times of subsequent notes (before, they were allowed to be equal).

Some users have reported seeing odd behavior in FL studio which we are currently trying to reproduce, but in all other DAWs/scorewriters we’ve tested, MIDI export appears to be working properly. Please let me know if any of you are continuing to have issues with Hookpad-exported MIDI files.

Thanks again for your continued patience.

I’m afraid the issue is still present, Ryan. I’ve just exported this.

Hi @CDEFGAB

We’ve decided to do a complete overhaul of the MIDI framework to address this along with other issues that users were having with their MIDI files. We’re still in the process of testing but if you can try it out at

dev.hooktheory.com/hookpad

using the credentials:
u/n: demo
p/w: demo

I am hopeful that this reworked framework will resolve these issues. Thank you for your continued patience

Ryan

Hello. I’m experiencing the same issue as the OP. Create a sequence C C C C C C C in a new project and export to midi, open in any DAW (I tried Ableton, Reaper and Soundtrap) and some notes have zero length. These notes are mute in MP3 too.

I was able to work around this via the free Finale Notepad software mentioned above. Just importing the midi and exporting it doesn’t fix it, but this does:

  1. Import midi
  2. Export to music xml
  3. Import music xml
  4. Export midi.

Hi @Michael_Rybak,

Thanks for this bug report. It would be very helpful for us if you could save an example of a song where this is happening, and either post it here or email us the name of it (support@hooktheory.com), so that we can try to reproduce the bug you’re seeing. Thanks!

Hi Ryan, sure. The reproducing sequence is:

  1. Create a sequence C C C C C C C C in a new project and export to midi.
  2. Open midi in any DAW, e.g. Ableton or Soundtrap. Some notes have zero length.

The Google Drive folder below has the song in json, the exported midi, screenshot of hookpad and screenshot of a DAW. The DAW screenshot shows a missing note in the midi in the 4th chord out of 8:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gLvykCeEV9YXK86oyW9BhvUiQsSTG-3W

Thanks for the detailed report. We’ve tested your midi file in Cubase, Logic, Finale, and Ableton Live, and it appears to be working normally.

However, we do see this issue in Soundtrap, which is not one of the DAWs we usually test with. We’ll investigate further and see if we can figure out what’s going on.

Thanks for your patience

@Michael_Rybak, we think we identified the issue.

It seems Soundtrap is having a hard time when a midi event specifying a note off comes right before a note on with the same pitch. We hadn’t seen this issue in other DAWs, but can fix it by shortening the duration of each note by a very small amount. We’ll have this pushed in the next version of Hookpad which will be released shortly. Thanks again for your patience.