I have a hihat track on my song’s main pattern that’s 56 steps and pattern length set to INF, creating variation on each cycle. But it’s incompatible with song mode because the song never progresses? How does that make sense? I thought the Change param would tell it how long to play the pattern.
My workaround is to bake the length of each section into a bunch of patterns… but this needs improvement…
What’s your Change length set to?
64
Well, a pattern with infinite length will play until infinity(and beyond).
The Change parameter is basically the quantize setting for manual pattern changes.
With Change Len. set to 64, it will always play at least 64 steps of the pattern before changing.
So it will only change after 64, 128, 192, 256 steps etc.
But pattern length can never be infinite or it won’t change.
Set your pattern length to a multiple of 56 or however long you want it to play for.
I just re-read the manual for scale mode, chains and songs. It reads, to me, like the CHNG length should apply in Chain and Song mode just as it does in manual mode.
It also doesn’t make sense that a LEN set to a multiple of the “odd” track length, plus a shorter CHNG length should behave any differently from an infinite LEN. The pattern should change to the next one, when it reaches the CHNG length either way. The observed behavior means that CHNG means different things depending on whether LEN is set to INF or some other number.
How confusing. Seems like a bug, or at best a badly communicated design.
Yeah, maybe I should submit this as a bug.
Definitely. The more people log “official” bugs around scales and pattern change, the more they’ll have to pay attention to us. There seems to be some limit, or concept, or company politics they’ve not (been able) to communicate to us about this stuff because there’s complaint messages here going back for years, and the manuals seem slightly off. I know they know about it because I’ve had back and forth with Customer Services on this/related issues.
They probably don’t know if they should “fix” it or not, on second thought, because it’s a reasonable replacement for infinite loops on MnM and MD (the only other song modes I’m familiar with). I guess you’re meant to give the A4 a kick (like with a skipping CD player) to get it to resume 
If it was me I’d just set the loop count to 99, add more entries to the chain if that wasn’t enough 
At least that would explain the inaction.