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Feature Request: Change Track Inside Piano Roll
1 October, 2020 - 19:39 — windowsrefund
I would love to see a pull down menu inside piano roll that contained a list of tracks (by name). Pulling down the menu and selecting a track would result in Piano Roll showing and allowing me to work on data in that track in the area I was previously at. In other words, let's say I'm working on an area that displays measures 4 through 9 on a bass track and now I want to work on the lead track for the same area. This would be a HUGE boost in productivity as the current work flow is a 3 step operation (close piano roll, select the thing, open piano roll). The thinking here is to allow the user to stay within the tool (Piano Roll) they're going to be working in rather than having to leave it only to open it again.
All the best
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re. Change Track Inside Piano Roll
thing is, the piano-roll is a MIDI clip editor, not a track editor, do you understand the difference?
on the other hand, you don't really need to close one first to open another. you can keep open all the editors at any given time--this of course might not be always optimal, depending on the window manger in charge, but may be a nice workaround; note that, among some other things, each clip editor position and size are saved into the session file so that it's restored on a later date and/or time.
also, the so called ghost track may give you a help in visualizing what's in that any other track, beneath the current editing clip;
you probably know all this already :)
cheers
Yes, I understand PR is a
Yes, I understand PR is a clip editor. That's probably why it's so tedious to work with actually. The fact you're basically cutoff from working with content that's just outside the scope of the current clip... I mean, that's just so frustrating yet people seem to have settled for this work flow. I've never understood it as I remember Cakewalk 5's PR, over 20 years ago, didn't impose these limitations and that supported clips just fine.
But the ghost track thing... I get it but that's not the same thing as that information is read only. IMHO, the feature itself is totally hyped and, if you think about it, is almost a work-around for work flow limitations we're currently discussing. I mean, if it were dead easy to switch PR's scope to a different track (again, I'm consciously ignoring the clip thing here), the ability to see another track's data in read-only mode would not be as valuable.
Think about it like this. Imagine you live in a house with 4 rooms. Each room provides a door inside and outside the house. The way thing are now with PR essentially means having to leave the house, walk around the perimeter until you locate the desired door and then reentering. All this just to access any given room inside your house.
I don't know if I can be more clear in terms of how much of a productivity killer this is?
All the best
re. Change Track Inside Piano Roll
hmm
what about having a single instance (as a future option of course;) for the MIDI clip editor (aka. piano-roll) ?
maybe, say, in a tabbed interface? where all and every and each summoned clip would appear under their own tab? just like every all-mighty-web-browser-and-your-kitchen-sink do nowadays? :)
interesting
cheers
That's interesting but I
That's interesting but I still think a single pulldown menu would be more efficient due to the potential for long track names. You'd want to reference things by track names and not have to burden yourself with having to know about clips. I tend to believe most people's "bass clips" live on a track named "the bestest bass track ever" or whatever. Remember, a clip is just a management tool that exists solely for the purpose of copying or moving a subset of data more easily. When you want to work on that bass line, you intuitively want to shift your attention to the bass track. It's unnatural to have to "go and locate the specific clip I'm interested so I can tweak the notes I want to"
Of course, I understand that PR being a clip editor, needs a clip. That said, a functional way to attack this might be to add some kind of abstract meta clip that can be used by PR instead. That higher level meta clip would be responsible for managing the "real" clips that are displayed in the Arranger view. Maybe the work flow would go something like this...
1. In arranger, user clicks on a clip
2. PR does the following
* Save or register the starting location of the targeted clip
* Create (or uses from cache) a new meta clip containing a merge of all clips from the source track
* Drop user into start time of new meta clip as determined by step 1
Of course, I realize I'm not giving any consideration here for how involved things may need to become in order to sync this meta clip with the real clips or if that overhead is really needed. It's potentially very complex....... or not? I don't know. I'm simply pointing out that a PR becomes much more useful when it is not tied, and therefore limited to, the scope of a clip.
All the best
re: That's interesting but I
Good idea!
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