From: D. M. M. <ros...@gm...> - 2008-12-23 03:11:17
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On Monday 22 December 2008, Dan Muresan wrote: > I eventually figured out that channel #10 is the drum channel. Perhaps > this is basic MIDI knowledge (which I admittedly lacked), but it is > nowhere made clear (or at least I can't see it). I guess the "#10 [D]" > notation kind of tipped me... On the one hand, it's basic MIDI knowledge that channel 10 is usually for percussion. On the other, MIDI is also such a wide open book that we really can't make the kind of assumptions you're wishing we could. It would work a lot of the time for most people, but as soon as you start implementing "sensible features" to make things "easy," somebody comes along to bitch about how Rosegarden is total crap because it doesn't work with his Plimflab 9000XT at all because of the stupid assumptions we made. This game cannot be won, and nobody has spent more time and invested more effort in trying than I have. Hydrogen is an example of an exception, for that matter. All channels are percussion channels with Hydrogen, because that's the only language it speaks. It doesn't matter what channel you use, I don't think. As far as the whole Hydrogen import thing, the guy who wrote that has been gone for four years, and nobody has touched the code since. Nobody maintains it, and nobody who does any work here ever uses it for anything. It's kind of one of those things where if it works, great, and if it doesn't work, we'll be accepting patches for things like that in about a year at the rate the Qt4 port is going. There's absolutely no sense getting into anything like that right now. > It would be nice if there was a warning when the user attempts to use > percussion features (e.g. the percussion matrix editor) with the "wrong" > instrument; instruct them to select channel #10, or even offer to do so > for them. This would have saved a lot of time. Rosegarden can't know. There are 40 billion different things you could hook it up to, and there's no way for the stuff on the other side to tell the application about itself. The burden for this kind of stuff is and always has been on the user. Rosegarden is not exceptional in this regard. > It would be nice if one could select multiple tracks (e.g. with > shift-click or control-click, like in other GUIs) and then operate on > them (i.e. mute selected tracks / delete selected tracks). I agree that it would be very useful to be able to select multiple tracks, but I think at this stage of development we can say this is a feature that just won't ever happen. This kind of idea wasn't build into the foundation, and implementing it would be very hard. Nobody on the outside has ever had much success tackling anything this difficult, and nobody on the inside wants to tackle it either, because it would be extremely difficult even for the people who have worked on this for years, so there is basically zero possibility of this ever getting implemented, no matter how nice it would be. -- D. Michael McIntyre |