Belongs to Beat

For many items that you place into the tracks of a segment, the Properties window includes a Belongs To or Belongs to Beat setting. Use this setting to specify a measure and beat that the item is logically attached to, even though it may be physically placed elsewhere. Logical positioning is useful when you want an item to be heard before or after a looping portion of a segment, but you want to include the item in the looping portion.

For example, you might have a four-measure segment in which only measures 2 and 3 are used for looping. A note that is physically positioned on beat 4 of measure 1 is normally not included in the loop. However, you can use the Belongs To Beat setting to assign the note to measure 2, and the note will be included each time the loop occurs.

Note The offset you use in the Belongs To Beat setting is limited to approximately one second before or after the physical position of the original note. If a note is offset more than one second, it can be clipped or silent during playback. However, applications can extend the prepare time in the DirectMusic playback of your file, making notes audible that occur more than one second before the beginning of a file. For more information, see DirectX Audio Help in the DirectX SDK documentation.

In general, you should not use this setting to set an object's logical time more than one or two beats away from its physical time.

The Belongs To Beat setting is included in the properties of the following objects in segment tracks:

• Sequence notes
• Bands
• Segment triggers and motif triggers
• Scripts
• Lyrics
• Waves