Audio distorting, MIDI notes not showing up after import, 3 minute song files creating 44-minute SeeMusic piece

Hi, thanks again for creating such a wonderful app! Just became a monthly subscriber.

I've spent the last couple hours trying to get my first video done. The problems I'm having are:

Imported a 2 min, 55 sec video file and created a piece...but this results in the piece in the app being 44 min long
Imported the midi file for the piece, selected "assign to current"...the notes of the midi aren't being displayed during playback inside the app, so I can't sync up the timing. All the visual particle and note effects are enabled in settings as far as I can see
Even though the audio of the video file I imported isn't too loud and doesn't clip or distort at all when played in QuickTime or VLC Media Player or my iMac's finder video player, it distorts significantly during playback in the app. It's as if the app is boosting the volume of the video by a few dB, causing it to clip

MOV video file is 2 min, 55 sec long:

Midi file is 2 min, 52 sec long:

The resulting piece is 44 minutes long inside the app, and audio is clipping as heard in this screen capture:

Can you please explain what I need to do differently to fix these issues? Thanks so much!

EDIT: I found out there was a glitch in the midi file I used. It seemed to be only 2 min, 52 sec long when I imported it into my DAW, yet somehow the file actually has 41 min of silence at the beginning (which doesn't show up in Logic when opened)... So I got that issue solved by exporting and importing a midi file with the correct length.

New issue: I got to the point where I edited all the visual settings including particles etc, and offset the video and midi so they appeared perfectly in sync inside the app... when playing back the rendered file the midi is ahead of the video footage by at least 1/3-1/2 second... I'm trying again now by offsetting midi so it appears behind the video footage by about 1/2 sec inside the app. Rendering a second time and will see if they end up in sync.

I still haven't been able to stop the audio from distorting. The app seems to boost the dB causing it to clip. I deliberately dragged the volume slider to the left in the PLAY window in the app, hoping that would bring the volume down to the original of the imported video but that didn't have any effect... On this next render I dragged the volume slider almost all the way to the left to see if that affects the final audio level.