Ha sh*t, had written a reply and accidentally pressed back!
1) Ok, that's not a bad idea. I'll think about it some more, sometimes i need to let ideas mature a bit in my head before i make up my mind. :) There is also the case of copy/paste which always creates instances right now. Another way of doing it would be to do something similar to the special paste in the piano roll (CTRL+SHIFT+V). We could pop a box which as options, one of those would be "duplicate pattern content" or something. But that's also not great. Ill think more, ok?
2) Got it working already.
3) Oh ok, so i think i understand now! If there is not pattern, we stop the sound. That's it. This one bugs me but i cant quite put my finger on why. One reason (although not a great one) is that is will now behave differently from FamiTracker, so im not sure how to accommodate this. Let me think about it ok? Maybe we could make it an options in the project to make everyone happy! :)
4) Thanks man, that's a lot of info. And you are right, the MIDI ticks can probably converted to frames. And channels, some MIDI messages like volumes, pitch bend can be mapped to the effects. Ill do some more reading, I am definitely a bit ignorant with MIDI stuff. One issue (which is not technical) that i learned the hard way when i added support for FamiTracker files, is that if you tell people that you support a format, they will open the file and just assume that everything will just work and sound exactly the same, obviously it will not! Almost nobody reads the documentation, no matter how much you tell them. That being said, most people that would be using MIDI are probably more "expert" than most, so maybe it could work. And MIDI export im less worried about, its import that worries me. Ill start by reading some more.
-Mat