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I'm not trying to argue anything about your design decision to make track correspond to single channel, I was just wondering what is the reason for it.

I want to import my old sequences into Qtractor. To do this, I have reverse engineered the file format of the old sequences, and I have written a tool which can parse those files and create SMF format 1 file. Right now, there are two little problems with this process:

1. As I said, some of my old sequences have events for different channels on the same track. I usually only did this on a track which was used just to hold initial program changes and volume controllers. SMF doesn't have the "only one channel per track" restriction, so my convertor tool currently just creates a Mtrk containing the exact same events for each track in the old sequencer file format. Meaning, the SMF might have a Mtrk with events for multiple channels.

I will change my tool to detect this and split such a multi-channel track into separate Mtrk instances, one Mtrk per channel observed in the original file "track", so they will appear in Qtractor on different tracks. So this problem will be solved soon.

2. When I import one of these SMF1 files into Qtractor, all the track names in the Mtrk chunks are ignored, and all the Qtractor track names are just the basename of the .mid file. The MIDI clips on the tracks (there's only one per track) also have their names as the basename of the .mid file. This makes for a lot of extra work for me to manually rename all the the resulting Qtractor tracks.

I would really like to have the Qtractor track name be taken from the SMF Mtrk TRACKNAME. Or at least, the MIDI clip name be taken from the SMF Mtrk TRACKNAME.

I built and am running Qtractor from git HEAD. I want to change Qtractor so when importing from a SMF, the Mtrk TRACKNAME is used for either the clip name, or the track name. I have looked in the Qtractor source to try and figure out where/how to make this change, but being a large codebase, it would help and I would appreciate if you could give me a pointer to where to look to make such a change. I am doing this for myself, I'm not asking you to make such a change to Qtractor, although I do think it would be a good idea.

I have a couple of hundred old sequences, and having to manually rename every track in every one of them just seems crazy, when the information is already there in the SMF, but just being ignored.