How to set single instrument channels.

[Mothcomputer]

I used to use famitracker, but since I wasn't actually doing stuff like making songs to run on real NES hardware — I decided to switch to openMPT.
I like the freedom it offers me so far, but I'm annoyed at switching between instruments, rather than just placing notes on a different track.

It's not super important I guess. But it's a preference thing, and I really feel like there's gotta be an option for that somewhere.
I tried with some hacky solutions (I tried to set a soundfont plugin to have its input as one of the channels, but for some reason I couldn't switch input away from the instrument.) but they didn't work either. Please help! I really wanna love this program but this little detail is driving me crazy.

[Saga Musix]

There's no such thing and it's not easily possible to add it either. There's three things that might help you achieving something similar though:
- The "pick up nearest instrument number" shortcut. In theory you could even bind this shortcut to the same key as some of the navigation shortcuts (e.g. previous / next channel shortcuts) by using the AllowMultipleCommandsPerKey hidden settings. Generally the module sequence needs to be 100% consecutive for this to work (e.g. no "---" patterns inbetween, no pattern jump commands, etc.).
- Placing notes without instruments will reuse the same instrument of the previous note.
- When working with multiple instruments assigned to different MIDI channels of the same plugin, the "mapped" plugin MIDI channel setting can help not having to manually switch instruments for switching MIDI channels.

I guess we could add another setting to automatically execute the "pick up nearest instrument number" shortcut when navigating in patterns, but as mentioned above it cannot always work reliably due to the complexities of supporting 30+ module formats that allow such crazy things as infinite pattern loops (so the picked up instrument may not always be 100% accurate but for "normal" modules that don't have any pattern jumps it will generally work fine).

[Mothcomputer]

OH Thank you! the selecting no instrument thing was exactly what I needed!