✨ Interpreting encoded musical times

[demberto]

Many fields containing time and position information (as well as start / end offsets) have been discovered already. They are exposed to as-is, no conversions from the uint32 or whatever to a human readable representation consisting of beats, bars and divisions.

😎 What I already know

Time / position fields are most of the time dependant on the PPQ of the project (and not the tempo!),

For example, at a PPQ of 96, a length of 96 means that the entity's musical length is a quarter or, a beat or, 1/4th of a bar.

Using the PPQ as a runtime dependency for calculation is already possible, but the part where problems begin are time signatures.

⏰ What's with time signatures?

The above calculations work only for a time signature of 4/4. If while measuring the length, a time signature occurs in the playlist or in a pattern, the formula probably changes and not accounting for this would mean all further calculations will go wrong.

👀 Where to look for?

The FLP format is very close to MIDI in terms of many things. I think, the MIDI format already has something of this kind and I would like to get insight from somebody who has experience in MIDI or how musical timings are represented in DAWs.

---

Achieving this would be a great feat 🥳, its one of those features that would make PyFLP 10x more useful that its right now.