(After search, i found
this similar request. But i'm back to composing by computer keyboard, so it's different in that respect.)
Altho many tracker users can't read a lick of music (which attracts them to tracking), for those of us who can, the ability to enter notes (as in notes in a score) would make using a tracker a lot easier. Altho sequencing software does this innately, trackers do not. For MPT, the Row Jump setting is the closest to note length we can get.
What would make orchestration (and transcription) a lot faster would be to have note stops entered automatically based on a quantize setting. For example, if i wanted to enter a quarter note staccato (the note is shortened before reaching the end of the quarter beat), the long-hand way of doing it now is to set the Row Jump at 2 (in this example, each row equals a 16th note), enter the note, then enter a note stop. For a long series of these notes, it can be time consuming. What if i had an eighth note the first beat of every measure? You end up navigating more than actually entering notes.
What would be helpful is a separate setting that enters a note stop automatically. Perhaps the user can select the type of note stop he wants to use, but the value of the "note rest" is a value (less than the Row Jump setting) which marks how many rows after the note entry to place the note stop.
So to enter an eighth note every half measure, the Row Jump setting might be 16 (assuming there's 32 rows in a measure), but the AutoStop setting would be 4.
