[Phazma]

In this thread I want to share all of my ideas how the behaviour of the Midi editor could be improved to make editing Midi notes a very fast and smooth experience.

I would love to see many people not only agreeing, disagreeing and discussing single or multiple of these points, but also adding their own points. As the ideas I write about are obviously biased towards my own workflow preferences and don't account for some needs other people might have, it would surely help the developers a lot if all people posted their ideas about how the midi editor should work in this single thread, so when they feel like working on the Midi Editor they can keep coming back here and see which ideas generate a lot of buzz and perhaps implement them.

Here I will start with mine:

MOST IMPORTANT (please devs, we need at leaste these!):

1) Snap follows grid visibility:
In the arrange view it is possible to have Reaper snap to the visible grid.
In the Midi editor such a feature is needed as well.
It slows the workflow down a lot if you are zoomed out and want to edit just in 1/16 and you have to change the grid setting for it to not snap to smaller values and when you zoom in to edit 1/32 or 1/64 you have to set the grid accordingly once again.
Please make it possible to keep the grid at 1/128 and snap to only 1/16 if that is what the grid lines show.

2) Higher grid line density (or define pixels between gridlines):
This is connected to request 1 and even more important in case request 1 will not be implemented.
Right now when zooming out there are too few grid lines visible.
It is already pretty problematic when 1/32 is enabled, you need to very carefully move a note to place it exactly on beat and not offbeat by 1/32 or similar. Again, to avoid this you need to set the grid to a value like 1/8 or 1/16 for it to snap to the visible grid lines, but sometimes you want to make finer adjustments without having to zoom in and in that case having more grid lines would help tremendously to see what you are doing.

OTHER VERY USEFUL IDEAS (in no particular order):

3) Option: note selection only exists when selecting multiple notes:
This may sound like a nitpick but the fact that a note always remains selected after an operation leads to problems far more often than one might think (at least in my workflow).
An example would be when moving a note and afterwards alt-dragging another note to copy it.
If the first note remains selected it is unintentionally copied as well.
In my opinion the concept of a "selected note" should only exist when using marquee-selection (or a mouse modifier to add notes to a selection) in order to be able to move, copy or modify multiple notes. I see no point in having a single note selected and it only leads to issues in my case.
If someone else however has any benefit in having single notes selected it makes sense to include this in form of an option.

4) Option: note selection follows edits:
In case request 3 can not be implemented, this would be another non-intuitive thing to change.
If one has one or more notes selected and does an edit to an unselected note (like dragging edge, adjusting velocity) it would make sense that the selection updates to the note that he is currently working on. Otherwise while editing, the user might forget that other notes are currently selected and afterwards do something accidentally to them (like copying) as well.
Of course to accomodate other workflows this should be optional too.

5) Change default midi editor velocity:
By default the velocity of notes in the midi editor is set to 96. I don't know where this value comes from, however different vstis react differently to this value so it might suit a bunch and not most others. It would be great if a default value between 0 and 127 could be set by the user in the preferences so that the user doesn't need to set it whenever opening the midi editor for the first time.
If no value is set in the preferences by the user, I would suggest a default value of 127 instead of 96 (which is what I would use) because that allows to immediately get an idea how loud a vsti can get and make gain staging easier (and also shows how full and bright it can sound). Also, imo, just scaling velocities down to the wanted value is more intuitive than having to boost some notes and attenuate others.

6) Illuminate Midi editor background of notes played by midi controller:
The Midi editor background color for selected pitches should also be active while playing a midi note on the midi keyboard (and switched off when releasing the keys). This would help when using the workflow of finding the wanted pitches by playing on a midi keyboard and than program melodies/chords with the mouse to match those pitches.

7) Improve modifier behaviour: Delete notes/CC immediately (suppress right-click context menu):
Probably would suit more the bug-fix forum but when quickly mousing over notes to delete them with this setting active, sometimes the notes are not deleted. It requires slow movements for Reaper to recognise that the mouse curser has passed a note. Would be nice if this could be improved.
Also I would suggest to add unselecting all notes to it, as it can be handy when using it as default right drag action when default left drag in piano roll is set to "Insert note, drag to move" to have a possibility to quickly unselect notes by right-clicking somewhere in the editor.

P.S.: I probably haven't remembered everything so other points might be added in future.