Importing MIDI written with triplet quantization results in corrupt, incorrect score.

• Oct 14, 2019 - 00:32

I wrote a simple swing-time rhythm in FL Studio, then transferred it to Musescore. But the score Musescore was both incorrect and had some bizarre glitches with the triplets present.

I've attached the file I used for testing. As far as I can tell it's completely clean, no other program I've used has had any problems with it.

The first issue was the presence of sixteenth notes when the source MIDI was written entirely in triplets with perfect quantization.
sixteenth notes instead of triplets.PNG
Expected:
expected with triplets.PNG

This persisted even when I changed swing mode to 2:1, and switching max quantization to 8ths instead of 16 notes resulted in bizarre tuplets that didn't reflect the actual rhythms of the piece. The closest I was able to get was by switching to swing mode, restricting quantization, and restricting tuplets. This would have been fine, if it wasn't for the second issue.

Deleting tuplet groups just removed the notes from the measure without leaving a rest behind, as well as causing issues with the first note of the score.

So say I delete this triplet group:
corrupt triplets 1.png

The first note of the score is replaced by a rest, and the spot where the triplet group was just disappears completely.
corrupt triplets 2.png

Then if I undo, the triplets are restored, but the first note disappears completely!
corrupt triplets 3.png

I've found that this issue seems to be fixed if you save as a .mscx and then reopen the score (assuming you haven't changed anything -- I don't know what happens if you reload when the score already has missing notes). But I've also had Musescore crash on me when I've tried to save it (haven't isolated the conditions for that yet), so it's not the best workaround.

As for the issues with understanding imported MIDI triplets, I think a 8th-note triplet quantization mode would be really useful, so that Musescore does less guesswork when the user knows for sure that the score is triplet-heavy. Something like how FL Studio has an option to just snap everything exactly to a triplet grid, regardless of what it might actually be. It wouldn't really work for scores with mixed triplets and duplets, but it'd be suuuuper helpful for songs written entirely in swing and such.

Attachment Size
test midi.mid 318 bytes

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.