Start at beat 1 in middle of measure?

[cuttime]

Actually, in Ableton Live, when inserting a meter change anywhere in the middle of a measure, it automatically starts on beat 1 of the next full measure right at the meter change. This leaves you with a partial measure just before your meter change.

Isn't this what the DP "Realign Music Automatically" function under "Change Meter" does?

[kdm]

Actually, in Ableton Live, when inserting a meter change anywhere in the middle of a measure, it automatically starts on beat 1 of the next full measure right at the meter change. This leaves you with a partial measure just before your meter change. Maybe Live is unique when it comes to that, but that's why I thought it would be so simple! Now on the other hand, it would take some serious finagling to get Live to keep the measure before the meter change intact while landing the next beat 1 on a particular frame.

That is unique to Ableton because of it's clip-based approach to assembling music. Partial measures don't work musically for traditional composing as they can't be translated to standard notation we could take into a session or scoring stage. It is also likely that most sequencers use a continuous time scale to reference note positions and lengths for bars/beats, absolute time and frames. Splitting one of those away from the others would require separating the absolute reference from bars/beats - that might break other functions, such as rulers and location-based even operations.

Ableton probably only references absolute time or samples and just tags bars/beats with absolute time/sample locations on the timeline.

[PoliticalBonobo]

Isn't this what the DP "Realign Music Automatically" function under "Change Meter" does?

I believe this just determines how DP will handle your notes once you've already inserted a meter change (e.g. squeeze the notes into the new meter, let notes stay the same length, etc.)

[PoliticalBonobo]

Partial measures don't work musically for traditional composing as they can't be translated to standard notation we could take into a session or scoring stage.

Good point. Live has no notation feature so it doesn't really need "locked" timecode and measures.