Hello and welcome. Phew, that's quite a big pack of questions!
Thank you!
:-) I was thinking whether to open more threads or to post everything as 'one' question but 8 threads seemed to much.
You can delete individuals patterns by going to the tree view, expanding the "Patterns" folder of your module, and right-clicking the offending pattern there. However, the + and - keys will currently not jump over deleted patterns. It might be a good idea to change this behaviour in OpenMPT so that + and - only show existing patterns.
I think that would be a good idea not only because one would expect such a behaviour but because it would also be consistent with what happens after
Cleanup.
As StarWolf3000 mentions, there are different limitations depending on which format you use, and there are creative ways to get around them. To give you another idea, you can duplicate your instruments to have two instruments pointing to the same sample, and then use their global volume, panning, and their envelopes to modify those properties individually.
Speaking of Instruments, I wanted to try ADSR envelopes so the
Instrument mode way activated. Later I wanted to revert back to the
Sample mode but couldn't find a way to do that. Ifter deleting the Instruments I tried everything to reenable using only the samples but didn't find a solution and by searching the docs and the forum I found only how to enable Instrument mode - but nothing about going the other way.
I have recently answered a similar question on the MilkyTracker forum: https://modarchive.org/forums/index.php?topic=4053.msg15062#msg15062
In short: The "transpose value" of a sample is not the same as scientific pitch! You must not confuse pitch with sampling frequency. Please read the linked post, and if it's still not clear what I mean, ask again.
Let us see if I really understand how that works:
If I understand correctly, OpenMPT expects the imported sample of musical instrumet to be
C5. If I don't have a sample tuned to
C5, I can change the pitch of the sample before importing it (to be
C5) and it would sound right. If the sample is not tuned before importing I can tune it by changing the sample rate (the frequency) or by using
Sample Tuner, or by using
Pitch Shift (if I don't want to change the sample rate). So the best would be if I can sample the
C5 note of the instrument using for example 44.1 kHz sample rate and no additional tuning would be required.
Next, for the
Frequency and the
Transpose fields - as I understand now upon reading your answer - the
Frequency is in fact
sample rate and the
Transpose value (note) is calculated
based on sample rate value. So if I imported the sample of
A4 note I must shift the sample rate 3 half-tones up so the pitch would be
C5 - as expected by OpenMPT. If the sample rate was 44100 Hz the Transpose value would be
E7, meaning I have to choose
G7 which is 3 half-steps up from the
E7.
Now, what I would like to know is
how exactly is
E7 calculated starting from the 44100 Hz as the input. I was changing the
Transpose values after creating the new (empty) sample and was observing the
Frequency trying to figure out the correlation between the
Frequency (sample rate) and the note displayed in the
Transpose field. When I selected
A1 as the
Transpose value the
Frequency (sample rate) was
879 Hz (roughly 880). Since by using 880 Hz as a sample rate the highest frequency that could be recorded is (according to Nyquist-Shannon) 440 Hz (half of the sample rate), which is
A4 - could we say that:
The note displayed as the
Transpose value is the note which corresponds to the highest frequency that could be recorded using the given
Frequency (sample rate) - transposed 3 octaves down.
?
So, if
Frequency (sample rate) is 880 Hz, the highest frequency that could be recorded is 440 Hz, which is
A4 - and by transposing that note 3 octaves down we get
A1, which is displayed in the
Transpose field.
Next, I am trying to understand
why is the Traspose value calculated in the described way (if my description is correct). Why wouldn't the
Transpose value initially be
0 so we could just transpose the sample up or down from zero (the current pitch)? Is the current way of the representation introduced to be able to get a feeling of the current position inside the
possible range? Because we wouldn't want to go below
C1 which would degrade the sound quality because of the too low sample rate? If the initial
Transpose value would be
0, then we could go to far down so the sound quality would be degraded.
Thank you very much for your reply!
Regards