Choose your Display Quantize values with care

As explained above, the Display Quantize value for notes puts a restriction on the smallest note value that can be displayed. Let’s see what happens if we set it to quarter notes:

Figure: With Display Quantize set to quarter notes

Oops, this doesn’t look too good. Well of course it doesn’t! We have now instructed the program that the “smallest” note that occurs in the piece is a quarter note. We have explicitly told it that there are no eighth notes, no sixteenths, etc. So when the program draws the score on screen (and on paper) it quantizes the display of all our eighth notes to quarter note positions, which makes it look like above. But again, please note that when you hit Play, the passage still plays as it originally did. The Display Quantize setting only affects the score image of the recording.