I'm also looking for various midi and OSC sequencers (not only for pd) at the moment and have found some promising and some not-so promising applications:
-Promising: Ardour is going to support midi (currently only in svn) - didn't try it yet, but I will do soon. Interface looks very usable on screenshots.
Midi editing in EnergyXT2 was also fine - but it can't send midi until now as far as i know. It's nonfree (about 50$): piano roll, with blocks: yes drag start and end points to control noteon/noteoff points: yes (doubleclick creates new notes) quantize to a grid of any size you want (and off): yes hot-key: yes lines down the bottom control velocity: yes super-intuitive scroll: yes (mouswheel + keyboard) super-intuitive zoom: yes, but no vertical zoom (?) ability of fullscreen editing in a separate window: yes, but I wasn't able to expand distinct tracks, but I think that's possible too.
Qtractor seemed to be very usable too in current version (0.2.0, build 2008/08/10): piano roll, with blocks: yes drag start and end points to control noteon/noteoff points: yes quantize to a grid of any size you want (and off): yes hot-key: no (or i didn't find it) lines down the bottom control velocity: yes super-intuitive scroll: yes (mouswheel + keyboard) super-intuitive zoom: yes, but no mouse-wheel-shortcut ability of fullscreen editing in a separate window
Currently I'm using Mackie Tracktion (using wine under Linux) for midi recording and editing, but its GUI is too CPU consuming for bigger projects. piano roll, with blocks: yes drag start and end points to control noteon/noteoff points: yes quantize to a grid of any size you want (and off): no fixed gridsize, but changing gridsize at different zoom-levels (very intuitive) hot-key: yes lines down the bottom control velocity: yes super-intuitive scroll: yes (mouswheel + keyboard) super-intuitive zoom: yes ability of fullscreen editing in a separate window: no
-Working but not my flavour of using a Sequencer (didn't try velocity editing and shortcuts) Rosegarden MusE
-Not so promising: too many... (-;
some links to some links: https://puredata.info/Members/syntax_the_nerd/seqwiki/Sequencerwikihome/ http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/linux/MIDI_SEQUENCERS/
hope I could help someone.
Martin
Damian Stewart wrote:
Martin Peach wrote:
(since i haven't yet found a pure Pd sequencer i'm happy with)
What makes you sad about Pd sequencers? Maybe it's fixable.
have you ever used Ableton's MIDI sequencer? it's a piano roll, with blocks for notes. drag start and end points to control noteon/noteoff points. quantize to a grid of any size you want (switchable with a hot-key) or turn off quantization completely to finetune timing (for that little 'humanized' extra, whatever that might mean). super-intuitive scroll and zoom with a single mouse button drag in the top. the main features in this i'm interested in is the quantization grid control, and the ability to super fine-tune note durations.
lines down the bottom control velocity. if you have two notes on the piano roll trigger at the same time, it's super-easy to choose which note's velocity you're editing.
i don't believe it's do-able in Pd, not without a ridiculous amount of work, and i'm too lazy to do the work myself (and if i wasn't, i'd do it from scratch in a different programming language eg Processing or C++, rather than fighting Tcl/Tk).
Why not run three instances of midifile or even textfile with the same data?
yes, this is what i'm already doing. the problem is generating said midifile/textfiles in the first place.
- easy access to velocity and note duration
Do you mean that the thing should output the duration at the same time as the note-on, or the file should be readable in a text editor?
no, i mean that i should be able to easily see and edit the duration and the velocity without having to think or do much work. see above..