[Ardour-Dev] let's talk about MIDI regions

[Dennis Schulmeister-Zimolong]

Hi all,

On Sun, 5 Mar 2017 21:45:42 +0100
Lorenzo Sutton <lorenzofsutton at gmail.com> wrote:

> One idea would be to have the main window as an "arranger" only for 
> MIDI, where regions become big 'blobs' which one just arranges like 
> audio ones. Then actual editing of the events happens in a separate 
> context (different window or space, e.g. down below on the bottom of
> the screen).

That would be a dream come true for me. :-) For me as a heavy MIDI user
I find the inline editing in Ardour very limited. I love Ardour as an
Audio DAW but tend to ignore its MIDI features simply because it is so
tedious to do any editing.

Back on topic, here's another +1 to keep MIDI regions. Like someone
else said on this thread I've also worked a lot with the sequencers
built into keyboard-workstations which usually don't have regions.
While great for spontaneous one-off recordings you end of duplicating a
lot of work.

Say I have programmed an elaborate CC sequence which I want to reuse.
With regions this is easy to do because all the CCs are in their own
region which can be easily be (ghost) copied and put above any another
region or moved around. Without regions you can only copy the events
and don't see where they are already used.

The idea of having a permanent background-region sounds nice, though if
it solves a few development problems.

> I am aware that Ardour developers have strong feelings *against* a 
> separate MIDI editing window (piano roll, aka matrix), but the fact
> is that midi is completely different from audio, and there is a very
> good reason for having the option for several midi editing windows
> for a region, potentially many in parallel.

Ardour has quite a powerful lua interface. So there might be a
possibility to "roll your own" piano roll. :-) One day I shall look more
into this.


Dennis