[medicine tactic]

These are my thoughts on track-based MIDI. I'm posting them here so I can link
to it if it comes up later. It's not intended as flame-bait, but it's a
contentious subject by nature.

The essence of the feature that's been called "track-based MIDI", or "multi-item
editing" is that all the items currently visible in the MIDI editor belonging to
a certain track are focused at once. It's an abstraction layer that lets you
treat a track's items as one big item, freely adding, deleting, and dragging
events around without having to first focus an item to operate on. Really, it's
the track that has focus, not any of its items.

This seems like a nice way to edit; like it would allow you to focus on
composing rather than item administration; like it would encourage a flow state.
And as long as you stick to the garden path, it probably would.

But it comes with a heavy price: Removing focus implies letting the software
decide how to manipulate the underlying items. You are no longer in charge,
*it* is. There is no way around this. It is the definition of what is being
asked for. Any attempt to add some way to specify which item you're operating
on, and all you've done is re-add focus. [1]

I have issues with this, both philosophically and concretely. And you should
think hard about whether you do too.

While I love REAPER to death, I'm unwilling to give it that control over my
creations. I'd be unwilling to give *any* piece of creative software that kind
of power. My editor should do what I tell it, not try to do my thinking for me.
I do not want to fight with my editor over how the underlying items are being
manipulated. Nothing kills flow faster than literally fighting with your tools.

You may think you'd never run into situations where you want to do one thing and
it wants to do another, but you'd almost certainly be wrong. The complicated
interactions between adding and dragging events around, stacked items and
multiple takes, item extension vs. item creation and who knows what else, almost
guarantee that sooner or later it'd do something you don't want it to do, at
which point you'd either bend over, or try to figure out which incantation would
align its goals with yours.

Fundamentally though, track-based MIDI is completely at odds with REAPER's
philosophy. REAPER is about empowering its users. Routing, actions and macros,
JS, WALTER, text config files, ReaScript, the SDK, and so on all have this in
common. REAPER is like a toolkit for building your own DAW. Track-based MIDI
is a monolithic abstraction intended to shield you from the reality of composing
MIDI, like a lie we tell children.


[1] It may be possible to have both item-based and track-based editing modes
available, but the development burden would be enormous. The former is not a
subset of the latter. They imply different architectures, enable different
workflows and different feature sets, and would continue to diverge as
development progressed incrementally. You just can't do everything.