Piano-roll replacement plugin?

[whyterabbyt]

If you're not nesting them, you will instead be having to set up routing for the plugin to receive MIDI from another source and calling up two different plugins to work on the track. Still more effort than it is likely to be worth. I was looking at nesting as the least annoying solution, yet still not worth the complication.

And yet done all the time for ARP, sequencer and other MIDI plugins. And if done frequently by someone, then probably relatively easy for them to simplify with track templates or similar. As always, up to the end-user to decide, in terms of complication for them.

[BONES]

I don't doubt the endless stupidity of the average human for a second.

[Dormant]

Probably not, Reaper's piano roll can be configured to do almost anything.

Unfortunately you can't configure nor edit the way mouse targets are, meaning when/where and how a mouse cursor changes from one tool to another. And this part is one of the reasons Reaper's piano roll is much worse than some other DAWs.

So no matter how many custom tools and keybinds you change, or even add scripts, the actual foundation of the pianoroll itself can't be changed.

I haven't tried changing the cursor icons, it wouldn't surprise me if that were possible as well. To me it's the best piano roll across all daws that I've tried, I don't need to constantly switch between different midi tools and I can configure it to rarely require a double click or keyboard modifiers and can utilize right drags for selection, which speeds up the workflow. But it requires configuration, the defaults aren't very good IMO.

I haven't looked at the Walter code.. perhaps it is possible to change the way things operate but I doubt it.

In my opinion Reaper has the potential to be one of the best piano rolls in any DAW, due to it's customization but unfortunately it's one of the worst when it comes to working intuitively with dense clusters of notes.

It's possible that DAWs like FL Studio have some kind of rather complex logic behind it's operation but so far I haven't found any DAW that is even remotely close to the piano roll in FL Studio. Simply selecting notes or changing values like length, position etc. is just way better. I almost never run into situations in FL Studio where I accidentally moved the wrong note or couldn't get it changed the way I intended. It's really subtle tiny details but they matter a lot when working with tons of notes close together.

Interesting... Long time ago I started to write my big midi projects such as orchestrations with FL and after years I switched to Reaper (because working with occasional audio was pain in FL). I struggled with Reaper's piano roll at first, but once I figured out how to customize it and whole DAW, I never looked back.

[Harry_HH]

Is there such a thing as a piano-roll replacement plugin for when you like almost everything about a DAW except its piano roll?

I find it interesting that people put so much store in their PR. I've found them all to be much of a muchness over the years. I loved the PR in Orion and it took me a long time to get used to every other PR but, ultimately, once you learn them, they all do what you need them to do.

Elsewhere I saw that someone uses Maschine in LUNA, so that's one possibility to explore, but I wonder what other people might do in such a case.

I was quite keen to get to grips with Maschine, as a replacement for Orion, but I found its sequencer absolutely horrible. I just could not get my head into the workflow it demanded. As I recall, the PR was OK, like any of them, but trying to build an arrangement did my f**king head in. I should give it another go as I'd probably be more comfortable with it now that I've dabbled in several other host applications.

FL Studio comes as both host and plugin.

As does NI's Maschine. I don't see any value in using a full-featured DAW like FL as a plugin, whereas something a little more stripped down, like Maschine, at least makes some sense.

Anyway, the thing is that surely the hassle of nesting your plugins within something that gives you piano roll functionality will result in far worse workflow than just learning to get everything you can out of your DAW's piano roll? You'll end up adding five extra steps to save two.

”once you learn them, they all do what you need them to do.”

Such as Live PR does the notation? I doubt it.

[BONES]

Why would you expect it to? Notation is an entirely separate thing, not really related to music production, as such. In 40+ years it's not something I have ever needed to use to get anything done. I wouldn't even know where it is in Studio One, let alone how to use it. It's definitely one of those things I'd like to see stripped out of my DAW.

[kraster]

Toybox have a reaktor block called... Piano roll and it's the best piano roll I've ever used.

Aside from that Ableton coupled with some of the new generators and transformers is pretty darn great.