A large Staff View feature list
Disclaimer: I'm still on X2, and I am by no means an expert. Some of these items may have workarounds, and some of them may be solved and I'm not aware of it.
1. Better interface for choosing note duration, since symbol icons were removed. The current context menu lists the durations as plain text which is not as quick to decipher than looking at a symbol. Perhaps a Maya-like circular arrangement of note durations (symbols) that pops up around your cursor when you middle click. I know you can rebind keys to choose them; but there should also be an easier GUI-based way to do it.
2. Make copy/paste more consistent in staff view: sometimes if I copy a section of music, move the now time, and paste, the selection will paste to different staves than the notes were originally on. You can get around this by using Paste Special (an unnecessary step IMO), but that's not as easy either, because...
3. The "Paste Special" track list is numeric. Make the Paste Special "starting at track" list display the name of the tracks (abbreviate them to 15 characters or something, if necessary). As it stands I have to look back at the staff view, find the corresponding track number, and choose it from a list. If the list simply displayed my track names ("Violins," "Tpt 1", etc.) it would be much easier to choose the correct starting track for the pasted data from there instead of having to cross-reference the staff view.
4. Integrate MIDI CC envelopes into staff view, or better integrate staff view into track view. This is to easily edit envelopes as the notes are laid down instead of having to switch screens to do it. I do use multiple monitors, but finding and lining up the envelopes with the correct notes (when the track view doesn't even display notes) is a workflow hindrance.
5. Allow the transpose input dialog to accept typed negative numbers. Clicking the little down arrow 12 times (or holding it down) to transpose an octave down is annoying.
6. Create a menu in the staff view to change common notation-oriented things like tempo, key, etc. The less I have to switch back to the track view for these things, the better.
7. Allow the staff view to display more than 24 staves at once.
8. Allow the mouse scroll wheel to scroll the staff view. WhizMouse can do this, but why should we have to install a 3rd party app for this basic bit of functionality?
9. Allow the use of the video thumbnail vew on the staff view (rides on top, like in track view). Alternatively, have a thumbnail of the video frame beside each marker, to make syncing to video easier.
10. When clicking a dragging a note on staff to change its pitch, provide an option (buried in the preferences, I don't care) that locks the note to the staff on which it was originally placed.
11. Allow the staff view to group instruments by section (or just by folder from the track view) and have those groups be collapseable, like they are in the track view.
12. When moving a selection of notes, have a greyed-out representation of the notes follow the cursor instead of the outlined box that shows up currently. I almost always move them to the wrong pitch by accident when I didn't mean to change the pitch at all. Or keep the box and use a Photoshop-style control character to lock the selection by pitch as you drag it around (shift, for instance). Going further, a different control character would lock pitch AND position in the measure, but allow you to drag to another staff entirely, like clips in the track view.
13. (more of a bug) Better clean-up and syncing of notes on the staff and their respective clips in track view. Currently if you create some notes, delete them, create new notes, delete them, paste over the area and edit the notes, etc., you end up with a lot of empty clips in the track view sitting on top of the clips that actually contain the notes displayed in the staff view. These clips should be automatically split and merged which each action taken in the staff view.
14. Vocal step record: allow me to sing in notes one at a time, right into the staff view. Allow for an insertion marker to be placed on a staff at any particular spot, and can be changed at any time between notes. Once the marker is placed, hold a (keyboard) key to enable pitch detection. A note appears on the staff at the marker in the duration currently selected, and will move as my sung pitch goes up or down, as well as play the note along with me as I sing it, as if I were holding down the left mouse button before placing the note. Once I'm happy with the note, I release the pitch detection key and the note is placed and the marker moves forward. Rinse and repeat. With this I could record a passage for one instrument, OR record all the notes of a chord on multiple staves (string section, etc.) by just clicking to a different staff and singing the next note in the chord. With good pitch detection this could be *much* faster than using the mouse for input.
15. Once chromatic input mode is enabled (right-clicking a note while selected with left click), show a magnified view of the note on the staff to more easily select the correct semitone instead of hunting for the exact pixel to make the note the correct pitch. Mostly an issue when staff size is small since the pixels between semitones are smaller as well. The magnified view will change the distance between the semitones such that it could be 10 or 20 pixels between a C and its respective C#, for example. Less pixel hunting and more control.
16. Customizable, colored bar lines (the staves themselves, not the notes). Helps to visually group instruments together and find the right section/staff without having to read the tediously-small staff names.
17. Display more of the staff name under each staff. Just 5-10 more characters would suffice for my purposes but it baffles me that it's cut off off at all. Customizable font size for this would be helpful too.
18. Allow the saving of a template file that includes everything except notes, tempo changes, key changes, and CC values. The envelopes themselves remain. There are ways to get around this, but they're clunky. (My current method is to start all my pieces at measure 2, so I can select everything from measure 2 onward in the track view and hit delete, then save the file like that. Doing it from measure 1 has a tendency to delete envelopes entirely. As long as there's a node at the beginning of the piece for every envelope, it won't get deleted when deleting from measure 2).
19. A setting within the staff view (could be bound to specific staves or globally) to automatically add or subtract a specific tick value from each note as it's placed. For instance: Hollywood Strings legato patches require notes to overlap slightly in order to trigger the legato samples between them. I've solved this with a CAL script and bound that script to a key, so I can select a group of notes and it'll add 80 ticks to each note in the selection. Having this functionality built-in would be nice.
IN THE CASE OF AN OVERHAUL:
1. Don't ditch the neverending staves for a page-based layout, or at least make it an option.
2. Don't change the loose nature of placing notes with the mouse. Cubase is too restrictive to me and relies too much on the "active staff" to do it. I like being able to place notes whenever and wherever I please, as long as snap is behaving itself.
post edited by jfcomposer - 2015/01/27 16:10:49