I know what you want, but let me ask you a relative question, but then on the Renoise side of the midi cable; i more or less attempted to create this imagination somewhere in my first reply, but perhaps you have a good idea that you can put in a mock-up for us here which would resolve the problem i foresee:
How would you design a midi NNA feature that allows you to manually send note-offs to your midi hardware, for note-ons that have been triggered two or three notes back in the same column?
I’m honestly curious…
Just let’s pick an example mockup from my side:
00 C-5
01 ---
02 D-4
03 ---
04 G-4
05 ---
06 [-]
On row 6 you want to send a note-off for the C-5 triggered in row 00. the NNA has been set not to send note-offs before each new note is triggered.
Tell me how we can realise this?
you could perhaps say, okay, the first triggered note-off shall be sent to the first triggered note.
For the above example, that still is fairly easy, but now we pull in the sequencer and make some changes:
Sequence [64]
00 00 C-5
01 01 [-]
02 02 D-4
[01] 03 ---
02 04 G-4
03 05 ---
03 06 [-]
05
Sequence 3 is currently visible (pattern 01).
Same question, but now which is the first note and how many sequence positions would you have to scroll back to figure out where the first note starts? Where is the last note-off? For which note is the note-off on row 01?
You might invent a whole new kind of note-off that really only relates to the note triggered by switching the note-char and octave value from position:
Sequence [64]
00 00 C-5
01 01 5-E
02 02 D-4
[01] 03 ---
02 04 G-4
03 05 ---
03 06 5-C
05
Makes it a bit more on target because the 5-E will send a note off to an E-5 casted somewhere in pattern 2 (or perhaps ending in pattern 01 on sequence position 1) and the 5-C will be casted to well, at least the first C-5 that had been triggered, you don’t know for sure if that will be the one in the current pattern or one in pattern 2, so you still might end up searching for lost notes that aren’t being cut or faded and you have to figure out which note.
You can also say “I don’t not want to send note-offs to any notes, i just want them to continue” because that is what you aim for, but the above is also a realistic picture if NNA continue would be applied for midi.
But we still have this thing:
Does your midi device automatically shut down the playing note as soon as the sample has been fully played until the end? or does it remain waiting for the note-offs before it again accepts a new note for its internal sample channel?
If it keeps waiting for the note off values, also your midi device will run out of polyphonic voices and will stop responding to new note input or will replace the last played note for the newly triggered one.
Gear is different, some midi devices support 64 voices polyphony, some go up to 32 and some only go up to 12. You can’t use over ten fingers anyway.
Plugins differ as well. If a solution has to be written, it has to support all these devices and plugins properly.
So, now you have something to feed your point of view, perhaps i’ve overlooked something.