I've been away a-while experimenting with a Mac app called PlayerPRO, which was recently made freeware, and is the closest thing to MPT for the Mac. (For those of you who don't know or forgot, i'm actually a Mac-user emulating Win98 with Virtual PC 3.) While in so many ways it made me appreciate the overall flexibility of MPT, there are some things i can't live without. When i went back to OpenMPT, these differences became glaring. So, i'd like to queue up and petition the king....
1. The layout of OMPT is so confining, because i often hafta leave one "section" to go to another one -- import an Instrument, then switch over to Sample to fix a loop, then switch to General to set up the "Mixer," and then to a new tab to begin plugging in notes. Then with corrections in the channel volume or overall tempo adjustment i hafta switch back to General, then back to Patterns, etc., etc.......i'm wasting alot of time. (We mac users are not used to this kind of inefficiency!) So what i'd like to see is either the use of positionable windows (PlayerPRO's answer), or togglable panes that show only the info you need, instead of tabs. With the latter idea, the user could click a close box to hide data he doesn't care about or won't be changing.
2. My biggest gripe is the process of recording tracks. It's funny; no one does it better than OMPT, but it definitely needs an improvement in the music production process -- specifically, the note-to-channel procedure. On one screen i need to see each channel's notes and their tracking FX, the global and channel volumes, and the VST effects applied to each track. In playback alterations would show up in realtime (if chosen in prefs), and editing ANY channel data easily available. I would also like to see EVERY step datum in one window, for easy composition and comparison. Since there is the real possibility of lack of room for an 1180x720 screen (or whatever that size is), this is where closable panels mentioned in the previous paragraph would come in handy.
3. Above each channel's display in the Pattern editor, i'd like to see this in a little data box: the last note played in that channel before the current pattern in the sequence, if it still carries sound or if it was NOTE-CUT'd or NOTE-OFF'd, the last FXCommand applied and its value. That way i don't hafta go backwards in my song trying to determine what some pad was playing before i switched keys or tempos. As an extra help, by clicking on the data field that shows this info, the cursor goes back to the point where the last note was played.
4. I would like to have the Tree converted to a regular menu to get it off my screen for good. I have no room for all the panels AND the Tree, and i get bogged down having to slide open the pane when i'm done Time-shifting or key-assigning.
I have many others, but we'll discuss these in this thread.
Like i said before, i love OpenMPT even though i have to go to Windows to use it. It's the next best thing to a sequencer and synthesizer, my natural method. I have composed a few good tracks so far, and more than a dozen started. So i hope to see greater improvements in the flexibility of OMPT. :wink: