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Drawing Velocity Curves / Muting MIDI parts / Reverse Loops

Hi.

Is it possible to draw or redraw velocity curves of multiple MIDI events?
If so, how?
If not, is it planned to add in the future?

Any chance to get muting of MIDI parts added to Qtractor?

Any chance to add reverse loops to Qtractor, so that the looped section is excluded from playing/recording?

Thanks.

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rncbc's picture

re. Is it possible to draw or redraw velocity curves of multiple MIDI events?

no, automation curves are defined for a track's timeline no way it will affect MIDI events differential or individually; no plans to change that either.

re. Any chance to get muting of MIDI parts added to Qtractor?

the only option you have is setting MIDI Clip Volume to 0% in Clip or File > Properties... dialog.

re. Any chance to add reverse loops to Qtractor, so that the looped section is excluded from playing/recording?

reverse loops aren't supported and unlikely to be, ever; and I don't really understand what you mean by "excluding from playing/recording"...
otoh. for MIDI clips, there's this MIDI Tool called Reverse, that reverses the sequence of selected events.

byee

TAERSH's picture

Reverse Loops means: the left loop-locator is e.g. at bar 40 and the right loop-locator is at bar 20, so when the song is at bar 20 it will jump to bar 40 and continue to play from that. So, everything in between of bar 20 and bar 40 is excluded from playing - in German it would mean: übersprungen.

No, I'm not talking about automation curves. I mean the velocity bars of each midi event in midi editor. It's very time consuming to select each midi/velocity event and to move it up/down to change its velocity. Just to have a draw function and to move through the velocity part of the midi editor (by pressed mouse button) and then to redraw each velocity bar dependent on the mouse pointer position. This was already possible in Cubase on Atari ST.

I don't see any properties dialog for midi parts. Only for tracks.

rncbc's picture

re. Reverse Loops...

answer is still no and no plans for that

re. velocity bars of each midi event in midi editor

you have MIDI tools where value means velocity for note events; also in Edit Mode > Draw you can change the selected event value bars as in free-hand drawing; one other option in Edit Mode On (not Draw) is making a click+drag straight line over the selected bars and change their values in a straight line/ramp envelope.

re. properties dialog for midi parts

a. on main window menu: Clip > Edit...
b. on the MIDI clip editor menu: File > Properties...

hth.
cheers

TAERSH's picture

Re: also in Edit Mode > Draw you can change the selected event

Ok, that's what I meant. I just didn't realize I have to select the MIDI events first. Good!
I couldn't find anything about that in Qtractor Manual.

Re: answer is still no and no plans for that

That's a pity for real, as this would add a very useful function to Qtractor.
E.g.: in real life I sometimes want to change the arrangement. So, this means to move a section completely to another song position at the end of the song and then to move all together back to where I removed to previous section just to test another REIHENFOLGE of parts/sections. And then revert everything if the result is not that good.

By having the option to place the left locator to higher bar numbers than the right locator all that moving forward and backward of parts/sections would be unnecessary.

Meanwhile I found the Properties dialog for MIDI parts. So, muting single MIDI parts is already possible by setting its volume to ZERO. But it doesn't indicate on the MIDI part in any way. Since it's already there: why not having an indicator for MIDI parts with volume ZERO, and why not just adding a right-click option: MUTE (volume to ZERO)?

rncbc's picture

re. Reverse Loops...

having the loop-start ahead of the loop-end would break a lot of the internal logic in qtractor processing, so no, don't have the time to even think about it. sorry :)

re. MUTE for midi parts

note that the setting of volume to 0% on MIDI clips are actually just a workaround: the clip is not really muted, as all events are still played back as usual, only note-on velocities are all clamped to 1 (and not zero which is an alias to a note-off on many implementations); to have a real MUTE, use a track's Mute control which in particular is automatable over the timeline.

hth.
cheers

It really would have been better to break out each issue/feature request/question into it's own thread as there's a bunch of things being discussed.

That said, I'll try to speak to the question about muting midi notes.

I agree this would be a very useful feature. My producer, who works in Logic, is able to do this quite easily and it's a huge time saver. That said, I'll offer what I do since I don't like the approach mentioned that involves mucking with velocities. The whole point of muting MIDI is more about doing something on a temporary basis as quickly as possible in order to explore/audition the change. You should never have to permanently alter the data in order to audition the removal of a subset of data.

So given the fact we can't easily do this in a non-destructive way, here's what I do:

1. Clone the track and make sure the new track's clips are NOT linked to the original. Highly recommend mapping a single keystroke to the "Clip/Unlink" or whatever it's called as this is a very common operation to perform.

2. Mute the original track.

3. Split the new track's clip as needed so the part in question is clearly defined (it may already have been split properly prior to the track being duplicated). Again, highly recommend mapping common operations like "Split", "Merge", "Delete", and other things like "Copy" and "Paste" to single keystrokes as these are really common operations to perform on clips.

4. Highlight the now clearly defined clip on the new track and delete it (I just whack "d" since I have that key mapped to all my delete operations).

Profit.

Your original MIDI data is alive and well in the original (now muted) track.

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