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Well, firstly let me apologize for causing you a lot of problems! My original suggestion was for a legato tool, and we now have this working just as I had hoped. Thank you again for that.

The articulation idea was secondary to the legato, but to me it seems to follow naturally from it. As an alternative to making the end of note X coincide with the start of note (X+1), we can make it end just before it, the gap being specified by the user. Like the legato, this was just an idea to help weird people like me who are trying to replicate as far as possible some of the characteristics of acoustic instruments. Strings and wind instruments, when they are not playing slurred passages, naturally produce a slight gap between notes. The size of these gaps is not fixed and is under the control of the player, but it is likely to be consistent within a phrase. The length of each gap would definitely not, as a rule, vary according to the length of the preceding note.

Hence I think that the user should be specifying an actual duration for the gaps.

If you really felt it was practical, I would say "yes, let's have the user express the gap-size as 0.15 seconds or whatever", but you would then have to complicate the operation of qtractor by getting it to remember which notes have had this tool applied and then recalculate where the end of each note should come if the user alters the tempo of a passage.

That is why I suggested that the more practical step was to have the duration expressed as, say, 0.12 midi beats rather than an actual time. OK, if I apply the tool and then decide to change the tempo, the gaps will change size in actual time, but that's really not a big problem. Nobody in their right mind would start tweaking articulation etc. if (s)he was intending to change the tempo of the passage hugely. And with small changes to the tempo, we probably wouldn't notice the difference: would I notice the difference between, say, a 0.15 second gap between notes and 0,.17 seconds? I very much doubt it.

A thought comes to me: perhaps a good compromise would be to express the gap-size in seconds and accept the fact that if the tempo changes the gaps will change. I would be very happy with that, but you might get some other pain-in-the-arse like me complaining about it in the future!

I do think that the legato and the articulation can be all part of the same tool. I suggest that the selection box should contain a number representing the length of the gap, with a default of 0 representing legato.

In the interest of maximum usability, I also suggest that as well as a gap between notes we can as an alternative produce an overlap, although I think that this is less useful. It would be achieved by allowing the gap to be either positive or negative.

The only thing I don't have a strong opinion about is whether positive values should represent a gap and negative an overlap, or vice versa.