Group channels

[Waxhead]

I would like the abillity to group tracks into userdefined sections. Bass, Drums, Lead etc...with the abillity to select a trackgroup form a combobox (drop down list) [all (default, bass, drums, lead, effects, ...] or something like that.

The idea is that ModPlug only shows the selected tracks as a group instead of all tracks. This would IMHO make managing a song a lot easier since you don't have to be bothered by all other things and can concentrate on a particular section.

If such a feature is implemented it shoud be uneccesary to say that it's a must to be able to mute individual groups or at least solo your group.

Most of the functionallity to support such a feature allready seems to be in place (channelmanager).

in addition to this it would have been nice to have a separate volum control for a group of tracks (se my other suggestion about channel volumeboost)

[LPChip]

Just to get things straight... You're mentioning different tracks, but you mean channels right?

[Waxhead]

Just to get things straight... You're mentioning different tracks, but you mean channels right?

hehe YUPP - Seems like the Amiga and ProTracker still have a strong influence on me

[XAVT]

He has a point.

[Sam_Zen]

I guess this is asking for a third category of channel-selection between 'solo' or 'all'.
Such a selected 'group' of channels would be a nice enhancement for playback-options too.

[Waxhead]

I guess this is asking for a third category of channel-selection between 'solo' or 'all'.

Not exactly, but you should have the option to solo only the group you are playing. Imagine how easy it would be to just solo bass-group and you can listen
exactly how your bass sound. Also if you could insert a new channel into the piano-group for example it would make stuff pretty easy when adding new
stuff that require a extra channel (chords for example).

So as I se it we would need a group-solo-toggle > userdefinedgroup x ... x+n in the menu.

To really complicate this request even more it would have been supercool to be able to add a plugin to a entire group but that WILL complicate things.
Also to make it worse for the developers you could for example color code the title (in addition to the text) of a channel to make it easier to remember a group.

The main thing that I think everyone would benefit from is the ability to just be able to view a group so that you can concentrate on exactly that part of the music. Also if you as you say be able to solo just that grop as well I myself can't imageine that anyone won't like this suggestion but then again I may be wrong

[pelya]

To complicate further there would be nice to hide such group of channels from screen (or at least shrink them to show only note and instrument without any effects and occupy only half of screen space - like "lo"/"med"/"hi" buttons on main toolbar - they do that for whole pattern currently    ).

[Waxhead]

pelya: Is that complicating things? I was under impression that this was exactly what I was asking for hehe

[HvitRavn]

I'm +1 for this, I quickly lose oversight of my channels in my tunes. And some shortcut keys would be awesome too. For example, alt+1 selects the first group, alt+2 selects the second group, etc.

Come to think about it, it would be *really* nice if I could pick the groups I wanted to show. That way I could, for example, show my super-complicated drum group so I can easily align all my esoteric timeshifts with my synth without scrolling back and forth like a madman

Edit: related to this, in Renoise you can "expand" channels, sort of, to play chords and such. That would be cool too

Re-edit: but I can see how the latter might be a tough cookie to implement in modplug.

[Waxhead]

I just felt like adding another option to this feature request. If this ever gets implemented it can be a good idea perhaps to gray out / fade away channels that are not part of a group. E.g. the selected group get's a bit brigther. This is a bit off topic for the group mode feature request but maybe someone would like this approach instead of hiding the channels completely.

I'm just throwing around ideas here

[bvanoudtshoorn]

I think that this should maybe be combined with this topic - it sounds as though they're heading in similar directions.

I really like the idea of collapsing the channels down - a bit like code folding in VIM or whatever. It would be nice to have different levels of "folded-ness", so that you could, for example, hide the channels completely (with just a stub at the top showing that they exist), hide everything except the notes, then notes+instruments, and finally notes+instruments+volume. That is, the same as the current low/medium/high with an added super-low. =)

Colour coding would also be useful. Perhaps it could be done automatically: have a set palette (which you can change, of course!) of say 12 colours which are assigned in turn to your groupings. The colours can be like the colours in an Atlas: it isn't necessary for every country (group) to have a different colour, so long as the different colours aren't adjacent. You could even get by with just two colours (for example, two-tone grey).

Edit: BTW - This link is OK. =)

[HvitRavn]

Don't click the link in the previous post. It will attempt installation of spyware.

[Saga Musix]

yeah, yet annother aggressive spammer. just ignore those posts.

[Sam_Zen]

"previous post" is no longer valid.
Indeed aggressive spamming so I removed it. This Aban did 6 posts so I have to trace them as well anywhere else on the forum.

[le_parasite]

it could be interesting to spread this request to the "save as wave" option, to add a group mode after the channel mode. It could be interesting because of some interactions between different channels in a same VST that the "channel mode" can't reproduce (Dynamics, vocoder etc...). I think it's a logical evolution of this features that doesnt exist yet lol!