"Focus mode" for editing MIDI regions

Background

If you’ve tried sequencing or editing a lot of MIDI data by hand in Ardour, you probably feel the lack of a separate “Piano Roll” style editor, that would allow you focus on one MIDI region you want to edit, without everything else getting in the way (the other tracks in particular).

Also the lack of direct access to all note’s velocities and panning makes editing MIDI data very difficult and tedious.

I heard that a Piano Roll editor in a separate window/panel is not an option for Ardour.

The current “Fit Selection(vertical)” feature (“F” hotkey) makes me think that such an editor isn’t the only way to edit MIDI data conveniently.

Editing Audio and MIDI has one paramount difference: editing MIDI requires much more vertical space to be able to access needed notes, and be able to manipulate them. What works great for Audio, doesn’t cut it for MIDI.
Audio can be edited in a much smaller vertical space, as long as you can see the features of the waveform that are your clues for editing. I think this is a big problem in Ardour, where the lack of vertical space for editing MIDI is still an issue, and I keep thinking of what could be done to solve this issue.

The Focus Mode

You want to edit a MIDI region with a lot of notes. You select that MIDI region and press Ctrl+F activating Focus Mode:

· The MIDI region fills the entire editing area,
· the piano roll zoom is set to a preconfigured reasonable amount (8 pixels per row?).
· The Track list,Session Overview and Editor List disappear.
· A panel with MIDI-editing related tools appear on the top.
· The Editor Mixer stays where it was if you had it open - closing or opening it be saved independently for the normal operation and for Focus Mode (so you can alter thetimbrer notes while editing MIDI data if you want).
· Mouse wheel no longer changes MIDI note velocity or scrolls though the tracks (as you view only one track right now) but it scrolls the contents of the Piano Roll - allowing you to access higher or lower octaves easily.
· On the bottom there’s a Note Velocity/Panning/Aftertouch/CC editing Panel. There’ a lollipop graph of note velocity by default, but you can change that to Panning or anything else. No automation lanes show here, we only focus on the MIDI-notes related data.
· You can play back the edited region in solo or in context with the rest of the song - a special Solo switch appears on the top panel that is directly linked to the tracks’s Solo feature.

You’ve finished your editing, you hit Ctrl+F again and the view comes back to normal - with your edited MIDI region selected as it was before. You’re out of the Focus Mode.

Do you like this idea?
What would you change?
Do you have other ideas to improve MIDI workflow in Ardour?

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I’m not a heavy MIDI user, but I did add a few tracks to a recent production. The current “fit to screen” works fine for me.

Velocities (of one or more notes) can be easily edited with the mouse wheel, and panning can show up like any other controller, if you wish. Here’s a video showing some basic MIDI manipulations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNAIEocphrM

The bigger problem, in my opinion, is the ambiguity with layered MIDI regions. Firstly, you need to be able to monitor the playback of a MIDI track while you overdub on top of it. Secondly, you can see and hear the layers underneath the topmost region, but you cannot edit those notes without changing the region layers.

The Focus Mode you’re offering - is almost piano-roll editor (just not only detached) :). Could be so nice! But, suppose, it’s so complicated item for development.

We have “Z”, “F” and “Shift+Z” combination. Just for now a little step for a convenient focusing is to make one key (“F” or “Ctrl+F” key) for focused/unfocused mode:

http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=7112

Quick update on my previous comment: It is possible to select a Range and “consolidate” MIDI region layers ( I think this was impossible in the early versions ?). So that is a quick workaround to make MIDI tracks more editable, if you don’t need to preserve the separation of the regions.

See @unfa:

https://youtu.be/OOXqQxPnLso

  • a faked video feature for Focuse Mode

Just writing to say I’d be very very happy with this if it were implemented exactly as you’ve written here. I don’t like DAW hopping but sometimes the primitive MIDI of Ardour makes me feel like doing so.

Similar functionality to the “focus mode” feature presented in that video has been in Ardour since version 5.6. It is called Zoom to Selection and it can be accessed via Z and Shift+Z to toggle the zoom state back again. There is also an option Preferences -> Editor -> General -> “Double click zooms to selection”, that if enabled will zoom to the region selection when double clicking.

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