It is possible to hide clip boundaries toggling "Show Clip Outlines" in the MIDI menu of the Track view and View menu in the PRV.

GREAT simplification.  Clips are, to put it politely, the dumbest thing ever for midi stuff.     Thanks for posting this feature request --- it took someone actually saying it to realize how many problems " CLIPS " make in midi.
 
In this, Sonar and Cubase seem to be in a race to the bottom -- you can't even enter notes without drawing a fictitious "clip" in cubase. 
 

Thanks for the heads-up, I shaln't be looking at Cubase as a secondary DAW, then.

Kev999
I used Propellerhead Reason briefly a few years ago. There, as I recall, it was necessary to create a midi clip first before drawing any notes. And, if you wanted to create notes outside the clip's span, it was necessary to either extend the clip or create another one.

And thanks for the heads-up here, too. No Propellerhead Reason for me, then, either.
I wonder how Studio One works?

Got Studio One last week.
I'm a long way from being an expert in it's use, but it looks like you have to create a clip first before you can put any midi notes in. Figures, one of the developers came from Steinberg.

Obviously I'm not a programmer so don't how it would work.

It seems from your comments that you guys must know these things so please explain to me how you can input a particular type of data viz MIDI data, without some form of virtual container eg a clip.

Music generated with midi is just a stream of event messages. A single note is simply a start/stop event pair.
 
To represent this in software, all relevant information for each individual note (start/stop times, note number, velocity, midi channel, etc...) is stored in a chunk of memory called a struct or record (different names for the same thing).
 
To put these note records in some sort of order, the programmer might create another chunk of memory to list pointers to each of these records in start-time order. Playing a song involves running along this list, sending out events as you go.
 
So far, no clips to be seen. My Cakewalk 4.0a DOS has no concept of clips.
 
Music consists of repetetive phrases, so someone had the idea of sublists of a phrases that can be moved within the main list. This harmonizes well with the philosophy of Object Oriented Programming. So we got Clips.
 
In most OOP languages, EVERYTHING must be an object. Unfortunately, us programmers being programmers, we like to make things easy for ourselves so this was taken to mean EVERYTHING must be a clip.
 
Driving forces in software are trends, acronyms, deadlines and selling ideas to management, sometimes to the detriment of customer convenience.

jpetersen
Music generated with midi is just a stream of event messages. A single note is simply a start/stop event pair.
 
To represent this in software, all relevant information for each individual note (start/stop times, note number, velocity, midi channel, etc...) is stored in a chunk of memory called a struct or record (different names for the same thing).
 
To put these note records in some sort of order, the programmer might create another chunk of memory to list pointers to each of these records in start-time order. Playing a song involves running along this list, sending out events as you go.
 
So far, no clips to be seen. My Cakewalk 4.0a DOS has no concept of clips.

In fact start/stop event pair, which is required for one simple note, is already something more than just a MIDI event. The same for program/bank changes, 14bit CC and all (N)RPNs (normally 4 MIDI events). And so, as someone had awesome idea to call everything in OS "a file", someone else has made a clever decision to call everything on MIDI track "a clip". Do you see any benefits to introduce many different "quantities": MIDI event, MIDI event pair, MIDI event quad, several MIDI events (what you mention in OP for copy/pasting) and a clip (as a separate visual/logical group of MIDI events)? I personally prefer just "clip" for everything. Easy to understand, remember and work with.
 
Note that in Sonar single Note is not an event pair. It is note start plus duration. While that can introduce some problems (for example with Yamaha synth logic), that simplifies housekeeping (we do not want have a possibility to by mistake delete NoteOff event separately from NoteOn).
 
As you can find in the forum, some users are already confused by "p" boxes. But that is the only visualization for the program change. What you are asking is showing "Notes in clip" and "Notes without clip" at the same time. Do you have an idea how that should look like on track/PRV that casual user can understand the difference?
 
 

azslow3
...What you are asking is showing "Notes in clip" and "Notes without clip" at the same time. Do you have an idea how that should look like on track/PRV that casual user can understand the difference?
 

This is what I was wondering too.    It was alluded to above, but I sill don't quite follow how these clip-less notes would actually display on screen - as little PRV rectangles floating within a track's vertical space?  Similar to one big Inline PRV?
 

@azlsow3: I was responding to mudgel using a simplified conceptual model. I was trying to describe the software implementation, not the GUI.
 
@stevec said: "but I still don't quite follow how these clip-less notes would actually display on screen"
 
Exactly the same way they display now. No change necessary.
Try it in Sonar. Make two clips, add some notes to each and overlap one clip with the other. (Semi-transparent clips would be nicer, even now)
 
I program midi solutions and am only too aware of the difficulties balancing usability with features. But the current clip implementation in Sonar is not satisfactory.
 
If you have the time, please try the following, you will understand the issue better than me describing with endless words. Imagine you have a song where the first 3 notes of the chorus are actually still inside the verse's bar, like "Blueberry Hill", if you know that song. To simulate this:
 
1) Create a midi track and press Alt+3 to open the PRV.
 
2) Place some notes in the first bar for the verse and at the end of the first bar add 3 notes going from low to high which are the "intro" to the chorus. Then add some notes in the second bar for the main part of the chorus.
 
Now imagine you want to rearrange the song so you now need to separate the verse and the chorus. Remember: the first 3 notes of the chorus are those at the end of the verse. How are you going to separate them into 2 clips?
 
So what I am proposing is the ability to make notes members of a clip, or remove membership from a clip. This by implementation necessitates notes without clip membership to be possible.