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FamiTracker
First off, I want to say that I love the new frame select+copy+paste mechanic, but it has a major flaw - if you try to paste to the bottom of the song, it goes just above the last frame instead of just below it. This is problematic because if I want to extend the end of the song I have to make a dummy row, paste against it and then delete the dummy row - annoying! I would rather have the new paste appear below the selected row, since appending to a song is a more common operation than prepending.
In today's OHC and in the chat afterwards, I realized that a lot of the time spent in Famitracker is spent just listening to the song and waiting for it to catch up to what I just edited. Therefore I propose these additions to Famitracker:
[b]1) Dissociate 'row being played' from 'row being edited'.[/b] Afterwards, allow a pattern to be played on loop without moving the screen around, instead tracking my edit cursor which is editing the pattern at the same time.
This way I could continually make incremential adjustments to a pattern without needing to start, stop, start, stop over and over. (I'm aware you can already do this with instrument editing, but if it's editing the pattern itself it's moving too fast to be precise)
[b]2) Create a new button/shortcut for 'play from current position, X rows earlier'.[/b]
The main reason why it doesn't currently is technical, not a deliberate decision - if you could start playback anywhere, effects that should be on would not be and it would sound different. I don't think this is a real problem, though - think of nsfplay, which you can advance forward in the song and it will silently execute the song until it reaches the point you're at.
Similarly, Famitracker should be able to go to the start of the pattern (or song?), compute until it reaches the cursor and start playing seamlessly.
Since I find that the vast majority of my edits are to the end of a pattern (to make an end-of-measure variation or transition), this could cut multiple seconds of wait off of every adjustment - that adds up fast.
(The X rows earlier thing is so I don't have to scroll up twice or hit page up twice to get a little lead in before the actual change I made happens. 16 might be a good number, for example, but ideally it would be dependent on the amount of time those rows would elapse.)
[b]3) Being able to jump around the song[/b] and, similar to 2), process intermediate parts of the song so it's a seamless jump.
I would like to be able to scrollwheel around, pageup/pagedown around, ctrl+left / ctrl+right around, click on other frames around, etc my song even while it is playing, and have it process from the start of the pattern I move to / all intermediate rows (whichever is more appropriate) so if I am just casually listening through my song to get a feel for how it sounds, if I decide this part of the song no longer needs my attention I can rapidly jump to wherever I need, without worrying about if extended effects garbage will ruin what I jump to.
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Tell me what you guys think of these ideas, and what you would add to them
(For instance, I notice 1 and 3 conflict a bit - if I move the cursor around, should it move the edit cursor, the playing cursor or both? An example solution might be that dissociating the two cursors is a toggle ala recording mode)
The current version changed how dragging selected data around behaves, it was much more precise before (the selection actually moved more freely and more in sync with the cursor, now it's like the selection won't move from one point unless the cursor passes through the middle of the next area... dammit if only I could explain this better!)
For #1, the "follow mode" button at the top of the screen seems to do exactly what you need.
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In addition to this, N163 wave previewing should work differently when an instrument doesn't have a wave macros. What I mean is that when you select wave 0, you hit the keyboard and it'll play wave 0, everything's fine, but if you select wave 1 it'll still play wave 0. Too bad!
Since I use some instruments to store many waves in them this would also be useful, because I currently have to either put a X wave macros, or insert a Vxx effect in a pattern with a note to know what my new wave sounds like.
I know this is very little compared to what Patashu suggested, but it would still make things better.
#2 there is F7 (play from cursor) but yeah, this is no good if you've set some important effects/volumes at the top of the pattern. OpenMPT actually seems to keep the effect state up to date so you can play from anywhere. Even scanning to the top of the pattern would be great though.
Right now though, to get around this, CTRL+ENTER is very useful. You can start playback at the top of the row, and just leave it on as you move around the pattern, pressing CTRL+ENTER whenever you want to hear a row.
Having NNAs without an instrument number continue existing envelopes from the previous instrument instead of retriggering it would be really cool
At the moment I can only continue envelopes with new notes by doing fast Rxy/Qxy commands which doesn't really work for anything past R/QxF... Would be cool for continuing pitch envelopes as well (for example having accumulated pitch ups/downs not reset on each note, but apply to new ones without an instrument number)
"Without an instrument number" is probably a bad way to specify it, since it will break any old FTMs that rely on it being a new note with the already specified instrument.
Instead, either it could be an effect of its own, or it could be a special instrument column value. Perhaps FF, or maybe it could be some internal value but displayed as "SS" for "slide" and entered by pressing S. This is just an example, but anyhow, I'm just saying I'm not really down with changing the current behaviour of empty instruments, since there are a couple of useful purposes this feature already has, and really can't be made backward compatible.
Oh, definitely! But the reason why I made THIS thread in particular is gone. I do definitely agree that we should never stop looking for improvements in Famitracker workflow efficiency.
I know that this is kind of a 1-month bump, but could you make Famitracker pre-execute effects, similarly to Deflemask? Or maybe enable logarithmic effects and macros? You could change this in Module Properties, perhaps.
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