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Old 10-07-2016, 11:58 PM   #14
Commala
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Feb 2014
Posts: 615
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Quote:
Originally Posted by juliansader View Post
I am curious to know how the border color of notes are determined, if color by track is selected. It seems that the colors of the MIDI colormap's channel section are used, but which channel? In my current project, for example, Track 1 uses channel 15's color, and Track 2 uses channel 7's.

I was just having a look into this:

When you create a midi item with no assigned colour, they will be automatically assigned a colour from the channel section of the midi note colour map. You can see this by looking at that item's colour swatch in the midi editor tracklist.

So what is happening is that when the midi editor is set to colour notes by track, the outlines of selected notes are using this randomly assigned colour. What's weird is that if you explicitly colour an item, you'll see that reflected in the tracklist, but the note outline colour will remain the randomly assigned colour.

If the track has not been coloured, the entire note will appear this random channel colour, not just the outline.



On a somewhat related note:

I'd love to see the whole 'colour by track' option get an overhaul. It's graphically very inconsistent, but it makes sense why. If you think about it, Reaper depends on the midi note colour map to render the notes. There is (currently) no mechanism to take an external rgb value and render notes to appear as if the map contained another column based on that colour. Remember, each column in the map could be composed of any number of separate colours, gradients, etc. How/where do you apply an external rgb value to an existing column to get a visually consistent output?

Possibly, a "key" column could be added to the map specifically for this function. It would likely give most predictable results if the themer made that column a desaturated and value balanced replica of the other columns in the map. Then, Reaper could colourize that column according to the custom colour input, and thereby achieve (greater) consistency across all note-colour modes. Although I find that hue-shifting gives better results than colourization, that might be much more complicated to implement than this already sounds.


Quote:
Originally Posted by juliansader View Post
Another titbit of information that I found surprising, is that the MIDI color map does not influence the default color of muted notes when
* 'Color notes/CC by track custom color' or 'Color notes/CC by media item custom color' is selected in the MIDI editor, and
* the track or item has been given a custom color.
Instead, the muted notes use the colors defined in the Theme development/tweaker window.
Thanks for this, one of those things I keep meaning to remember :P
Will have to update the old theme mod, I remember someone mentioning muted notes didn't look right, now I know why.
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