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FamiTracker
I would love to have a piano keyboard view I could look at that would show me which notes are active at any given moment, and by which channels. I made a couple of mockups to show how it might look.
[url=http://dougzwick.com/keyboard1.png]Fig. 1
Fig. 1 shows that the Triangle channel is playing the note B-1, the VRC6 Sawtooth channel is playing F#2, the 2A03 Pulse 1 & 2 channels are playing A-2 and D-3 respectively, and the VRC6 Pulse channels are both playing A-4 (one of them probably has P7F). Furthermore, the little "D" indicator on C-3 indicates the DPCM channel, and the little "N" on A#0 shows that the Noise channel is playing A-#.
The keys in this model are big enough for three non-DPCM, non-Noise channels to share a note with enough room to spare for either DPCM or Noise. If more notes shared the channel, it could look like Fig. 2:
[url=http://dougzwick.com/keyboard2.png]Fig. 2
Fig. 2 shows the VRC7 FM Channel 1 alone on the note C-2, while C-3 shows FM Channels 2, 3 and 4, and a little "..." indicator above them showing that at least one additional channel is sharing that note as well. This indicator is red, the color of the VRC7 instruments, to indicate that the first supernumerary channel that is sharing C-3 is a VRC7 channel; if it were a 2A03 channel (or some other expansion, in the case of a multi-chip file), it would be white (or whichever color is used for that expansion).
In most respects, this new keyboard would function a lot like the one found in the Instrument Editor: it would modify its indication of which note a channel is playing based on Qxx and Rxx, it would show arpeggiation based on 0xx, etc. However, I'd really like it if it could be visible by itself. Maybe it could be a floating palette, or maybe it could take the place of the Instrument pane in the main window (and could be selected via a tab?).
This would really help me visualize the chord structure of a song while I'm writing it.
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