OK, thanks for your help, I took it all on board and had a play last night. Problem solved! After having a good look around I saw that out of the 4 pickup machines, one of them (the one giving me problems) had length turned on. From my current understanding, the length parameter allows octatrack to change tempo based on the loop you create, and multiples (X1,X2, X3 etc) are either double, triple, the original loop.
As the machine is already running when I create loops, I think there’s a bit of a “glitch” that tries to do some sort of tempo sync, but as the machine is already on, it goes a bit bonkers.
I found this in another thread, and was very similar in the way I was getting different lengths when making loops;
> " 2: Tempo recalc on the other hand takes the next coming value on a 16/32/64/128/256/512 etc grid as a reference.
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> Example: with master track =64, a PU recording stop action at step 135 will stop recording at step 192 and tempo will be recalculated as if the recording was 256 steps long as shown in the video I posted above (mind this: it will not choose 128 which is closer to 135 than 256!!).
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> In other words, if we want quantized PU recordings, of an undefined lenght, that do not change the tempo, we only have the choice of 64/128/256/512 etc amount of steps but we need to initiate a stop action during the last master track cycle . (BTW Track scale doesn’t matter, only Master Track scale does).
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> For master track =64:
> target=64: action stop anywhere will do
> target=128: action stop between 64 and 128
> target=256: action stop between 192 and 256
> target=512: action stop between 448 and 512
> target=1024: action stop between 960 and 1024
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> Hence, a fully quantized Pickup recording of 96, 192 or 320 beats is not possible.
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> This is not a bug, but I qualify this as a design flaw: we have two different reference grids, AND a weird rounding choice has been made."
Thanks for jumping on this though, this is a super beast to get into so great that it has a brilliant community that are keen on helping each other out!
HIGH FIVE!!!