The Now time and how to use it

Every project has a current time, known as the Now time, which keeps track of where you are in a project. The Now time appears as a vertical line in the Track view and is displayed in the Transport module in the Control Bar (see Transport module).

Figure 89. The Transport module in the Control Bar.

A. Current Now time (click to cycle through the available display formats) B. Position C. Meter

The Transport module can show the Now time in several formats. Click the time display to toggle between the following time formats:

MBT. Display time as Measure:Beat:Tick.

HMSF. Display time as Hour:Minute:Second:Frame. This format is also referred to as SMPTE time.

Milliseconds. Display time in milliseconds.

Samples. Display time in samples.

The measure, beat, and tick number (MBT) identifies the Now time in musical time units. Ticks are subdivisions of quarter notes and indicate the timebase of the project. For more information about the timebase, see Setting the MIDI timing resolution. Here are some examples of times expressed in measure, beat, and tick (MBT) format:

Time	What it means
1:01:000	First beat of the first measure
9:04:000	Fourth beat of the ninth measure
4:02:060	The 60th tick of the second beat of the fourth measure

The hours-minutes-seconds-frames format is commonly referred to as the SMPTE time. SMPTE is the acronym for the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. In this format, time is measured in hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. It’s not necessary for a project to begin at time zero in this format—any time can be used to represent the start of a project. If you are synchronizing Cakewalk with an external device whose start time is not 0, you must offset Cakewalk to match the external device’s start time. For more information, see Synchronizing your gear.

Here are some examples of times expressed in this format (assuming that zero is the start time):

Time	What it means
00:00:00:00	The beginning of the project
00:05:10:00	Five minutes and ten seconds from the beginning of the project
01:30:00:00	One hour and thirty minutes into the project
00:00:00:05	Five frames into the project

Cakewalk provides many ways to set the Now time. Here are just a few:

To change the Now time

Click the desired time on the Time Ruler in the Track view, Piano Roll view, or Staff view.

In the Navigator pane, click anywhere in the view while holding down the CTRL key to change the Now Time to that location.

Drag the Position slider in the Transport module.

Click the transport buttons in the Transport module.

Click on an event in the Event List view.

You can also set the Now time by right-clicking in the Clips pane if you enable the Right Click Sets Now option in Track view Options > Click Behavior menu.

When entering a time in MBT format, the beat and tick values are optional. You can use a colon, space, decimal point, or vertical bar to separate the parts of the Now time:

You enter	The Now time is set to
2	2:01:000
4 2 0	4:02:000
9	9:01:000
5|1:30	5:01:030

When entering a time in SMPTE format, you can enter a single number (hour), two numbers (hour and minutes), three numbers (hour, minutes, and seconds), or all four numbers.

If you click in the Time Ruler while the snap grid is enabled, the Now time will be snapped to the nearest point in the grid. By setting the grid size to a whole note or quarter note, you can easily set the Now time to a measure or beat boundary.

Note: The Time Ruler only obeys snap when Musical Time or Absolute Time is selected in the Control Bar’s Snap module.

When playback or recording is stopped, the Now Time either remains at the point where the project stopped or snaps back to the Now Time Marker. This behavior is specified with the Track view Options > On stop, Rewind to Now Marker command (or by pressing CTRL+W). For more information, see The Now time marker.

MIDI note will continue to play If Now time is moved

Changing the Now time while a MIDI note is sounding will cause Cakewalk to play the full duration of the note. This behavior was introduced in Cakewalk 4.0.3, and is necessary as a result of addressing various gapping issues when editing MIDI data during playback.

If you prefer a slight hiccup instead of hearing the full note duration, you can change the default behavior with the Set Now Time with Full Restart option in the Track view Options menu.

Note: Moving a MIDI note event during playback is affected by this same issue.

 

See:

The Now time marker

The Track view Now Time display

Displaying the Now time in large print

Other ways to set the Now time