Quality of life improvement
Copy patterns (same of different channel)
I would like this too, im just not sure how to do it in a way that will be clear to the user what is a copy versus what is an instance. Do you have a suggestions? In the meantime, here is how i do it very fast.
1) Go in the pattern you want to copy
2) Double-right click on header to select all notes
3) Copy
4) Double-right click on header of the destination
5) Paste
Better remembering of folders
Easy fix, will do right away.
Save/load instruments
Here is what i would propose, let me know if that would work for you. What if the same button that let you open FamiTracker instrument files (FTI) could let you open a FamiStudio file. Then it would show you a list of instrument that are in it, with check boxes, and you pick the ones you want. So basically you could create yourself a dummy project that is a collection of all your favorite instruments and just load them when you need them. What do you think?
Mute channels with no patterns.
This one is tricky. When you press play, FamiStudio will try to be smart and figure out exactly how the song should sound at this point in time (unlike FamiTracker, which does a really bad job of this, playing in the middle of a song will somtimes result in the wrong instrument, etc.). I would prever to stick to that rule. In understand that in the middle of composing a song, things are half-done and might have lingering notes, but changing this feels wrong, you end up with a song that could sound different depending on where you play from, and this scares me.
Solo channels.
Right-click on channel icon.
Features
Standard timer (MM:SS)
Ok, but i would make this an option in the configuration, how does that sound?
MIDI support:
This one i will need your help with. Ive had a lot of requests for it but I'm not a MIDI guru. The 2 main issues are:
1) How to handle the fact that MIDI files can have many notes playing at once? When loading a MIDI file, how do we assign them to the 5 NES channels? How do we map them to instruments? Any suggestions is welcome here. It needs to be simple and intuitive.
2) How to handle tempo. You've watched my tempo video, NES run at 60FPS, so we are very limited in what we can do for tempo. How do you think we could map the speed of a MIDI file to FamiStudio?
-Mat