The Yellow 'Beat' Bar at the top of the project window

Ron-Coutts wrote on 16/05/2019, 12:42

Music Maker version - full version paid for running on Windows 10

Refer attachment.

What is the yellow bar that runs along the top of the project window called? Somehow. it appears to have collapsed in on itself, so it's no longer a bar, but a single point. This is the 2nd time it's happened. The first time was at the very beginning of a project, so I just scrapped it and started again. This time I'm many hours into the project and don't want to start again.

How do you re-set it?

What caused it? (so I can ensure that I don't let it happen again)

And would it have had anything to do with erasing/deleting the final third of the project I was working on?

Looking forward to your response 😁😁




ralftaro wrote on 16/05/2019, 15:36

Hi Ron,

Looks like your start and end marker are overlapping, apparently to a degree where you can no longer just pull them apart by dragging them with your mouse. Not completely sure how you ended up with this situation. If you can figure it out, please feel free to let me know. Also not sure if and how this relates to part of your project disappearing. There are "range" operations in the "Edit" menu, which pertain to the marked range. So, if you used one of those, and something was asked with the marked range, maybe that could have caused it?

Anyway, my suggestion would be to try the following steps to see whether you can open up the overlapping start and end marker again, and thus recover proper playback on this project:

1.) Hit the F4 function key to recover the default screen layout. Among other things, this should also set the start & end markers to cover the full range of actual content in the project, and thus pull them apart again.

2.) You can generally set the start marker by left-clicking into the area of the markers above the timeline, while the right mouse click will set the end marker. With the overlapping markers, you may notice that left-clicking to the left side of the overlapping markers will move both markers, and they will still remain locked up. However, try right-clicking a few beats or bars to the right side of the overlapping markers, and you should hopefully find that this will pull them apart again, and you can now manipulate and move them inidvidually.

3.) If both of the approaches above fail, please copy the content from the problematic project over into an empty project. In order to do this, simply do a select all (CTRL+A) within the project, and then copy the selected content via CTRL+C. Then open an fresh project via the "File" menu => "New project" option. In the fresh, empty project simply paste the clipboard contents via CTRL+V again. You should see your full project content again, without any problems of the two markers overlapping now.

Hope this helps!

Vincent-Allain wrote on 16/05/2019, 22:03

This happens to me from time to time although I'm not sure either how it happens. I have a little trick to get out of this: I double click a midi section to open it up in the midi editor, and that automatically resets the start and end markets to the start and end of that midi section.

However, from your screenshot, you do not seem to have any midi parts. Maybe just create a dummy one and use that as a rescue? Just an idea...

Ron-Coutts wrote on 17/05/2019, 01:46

Thank you for your feedback Ralftaro and Vincent-Allain 😃 It probably wont surprise you to know that the simplest remedy worked ... and by that I mean pressing F4 and resetting the workspace. I spent ages trying fix it, and resetting to the default layout never occurred to me!! So, I didn't need to attempt the alternative ideas, and since I don't know how I caused the problem in the first place I couldn't replicate it to see if the other remedies worked 😉

It's a relief to know that I'm not the only one who's experienced this problem with no idea how it happens, but unfortunately, it didn't fix the other issue of the missing final third of the project 😞 What's really weird about that, is the drum part is literally cut off. I can understand the other instrument loops can be accidentally deleted, but the drum part had been dragged out to fit the length of the project and was effectively a 'single' loop, yet it ends where the rest of the loops have gone missing as if it were cut using the scissors tool .... very strange.

Thanks again for your help guys!!

brian-hill wrote on 19/05/2019, 06:23

I have experienced this same issue from time to time and I agree that it can be indescribably infuriating, especially since it just happens without any explanation. If memory serves me, I believe it happened suddenly when I was clicking in and out of different midi tracks and the track bar sets itself to the length of each individual track. But when I backed out of one, it had shrunk like that. Good to know F4 is the magic key. Just don't throw and "Alt" in there ;)

Ron-Coutts wrote on 19/05/2019, 15:09

It was frustrating Brian, not knowing what I had done to cause it, but based on your experience it would appear it can happen quite randomly 😬