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1. Beyond the eye-candy, what practical information would this provide that's not already known to the end user?

2. As a former drummer, I'm very sensitive to how easily (or not) I can edit velocities and believe I have a work flow that would serve you well for both this issue and what you're mentioning in your 3rd point.

The trick is to bind a left-hand-only key binding to Edit/Select Mode/Edit Off inside of Piano Roll (Piano Roll -> Help -> Shortcuts). The reason I strongly suggest a left-hand-only (or reversed if you use the rodent with your left hand) is to avoid having to move your other hand back and forth between the rodent and keyboard. Using a DAW is quite different from normal computing best practices since we really do need to use the rodent in order to work most efficiently. Therefore, it makes sense to divide things up where that device is primarily used to "select" and the other hand (remaining on the keyboard) determines the action. Obviously, we can't always do this for every operation but it's a better place to start from.

Since Edit/Select Mode/Edit Off has the side effect of changing the cursor to what I can only refer to as "select mode", I bind it to 's' since it's easy to think "select" and intuitively strike the 's' key. Then, I'm free to select notes of my choosing (perhaps in combination with the ctrl key when selecting multiple notes).

There are also many times I want to select all notes within a clip I am editing. That's why I bind 'a' to Edit/Select/All

Of course, we need a way to easily change the cursor to Edit/Select Mode/Edit On. I personally bind 'w' to that action since it's very intuitive to think of 'write'.

So, with s, a, and w bound and easily smashable with a single key stroke, I can accomplish 99% of the work I tend to do inside of Piano Roll. Of course, there are some other areas and practices I make use of in order to help me work this efficiently. I'll just scribble a few that come to mind.

1. Most of the time, my arranger is set to select by cip (Edit/Select Mode). I've never felt the need to use any other mode other than automation. Since these are the only 2 modes I've found a need to use, one is bound to F5 and the other is bound to F6.

2. All common operations are bound to sensible single keys. When I say "common" I'm talking about the things we do inside Piano Roll all the time like closing the window (x), undo (z), quantizing (q), transposing (t), maximizing the piano roll window (f), deleting what has been selected (d), opening the events panel (e).. perhaps others, can't remember all of them at the moment.

3. Again, all common Arranger windows are also bound to easily smashable single keys. The fact that keys can be bound independently across both the arranger and piano roll is one of Qtractor's greatest super powers. For example, I merge selected clips with 'g' (think: group), delete (d), split (s), copy (c), paste (v), undo (z), unlink (t), loop set with 'r' (think "repeat"). Move transport backwards (b), move transport forward with 'f'...

Seriously, the left-handed single keybindings allow me to move and operate so much faster than if I were driving the DAW soely by clicking around everywhere with the rodent and having to depend on little utility tools/panels.

Of course, I also bake things in along the way in order to avoid having to need tools like what you're asking for in #3. For example, each drum (or reasonable group like toms), is on its own track. This allows me to tweak velocities so easily since I don't have to filter or hunt/peck. Hell, I'll even separate a snare drum track into 2 so just my ghost notes are on their own. This actually came up very recently while collaborating. The drum patch used during collaboration obviously sounded different and we wanted to raise the velocities of the ghost notes. Since they were all on their own track, this was easily done by selecting all and just sliding any of the lollipops up.

I could go on and on but you get my point. Qtractor is very good when it comes to providing a framework that allows someone to customize their work flow.