Hi, I’d like to propose an improvement to how MIDI import is handled. Instead of creating a new song when importing a MIDI file, it would be great to be able to drop MIDI data directly onto a track. One use case for this is with Stylus RMX, where you can select a groove and modify it with chaos and time designer, and then export the MIDI to the sequencer. There are plenty of other plugins out there that have similar capability.
And those are just the ones that mention Stylus RMX specifically!
Thank you.
Alternatively: is there any way this could be implemented as a tool? I haven’t done any work with tools yet so I have no idea…but if it’s feasible then I’d be interested in having a go at it.
There is a file handling function that Renoise can supply tools to handle files with a certain extension, but Renoise is preprocessing (preloading) the file first before it gives “second command” aka the tool a chance to deal with it, which means that no tool gets the chance to fully control the way the Midi file is loaded using those API functions.
If one would write an own Midi file importer (reading the file in binary mode and disect it with an own internal handler), you could load files from within the tool as in manually browse to the folder and select the file in the file dialog, but drag and drop will always make Renoise attempt to load the midi file as a song rather than allow a tool-maker to deal with the midi snippet as track data.
Does midi drag and drop work with normal OS file explorers? In that case, here is an ugly idea for a tool hack to consider:
A tool that creates a folder of tracks and regularly scans them for new files. The user could then drop a midi file in a normal file structure that is temporarily created and opened whenever loading a song (my_song/track 01). When a file is dropped the script will recognize it (within 3 seconds?) and trigger the appropriate behavior.
