One thing I keep needing to do is jump into the MIDI route settings dialog and transpose the route up or down by an octave or two. What I find myself doing is selecting all the text in the “Transpose” box (which typically says something like “+1.0 - up 1 octave”, and typing 2 and return or whatever. One thing I’d find really good from a smooth workflow perspective would be up/down octave buttons, so I could use a single click instead of selecting all and entering text. The up/down transpose buttons by semitone are great, but for me I find myself transposing by octave more frequently, so a pair of dedicated octave buttons would be really great.
Actually, the three text boxes in that dialog (lowest note, highest note and transpose) all have the same behaviour whereby when you click to focus, you need to select all the text before you can type another value, which is one of those little things that become irritating if you’re doing it a lot. Since I suspect the typical use when clicking in these boxes is to enter a new number, rather than edit the existing text, perhaps making the text boxes become fully selected as soon as focus enters from a mouse click would be worth considering?
Another little thing would be to maybe revisit the way text appears in the transpose box, as it often gets cropped at the most important bit:
Also if you use the mouse wheel on that transpose box, the text then becomes right-justified, so the +1.3 or whatever gets lost. Maybe making the text more compact could help, with unicode arrows and abbreviating to “oct” etc. In fact since there’s already a + or -, I wonder if “up a” and “down a” are redundant? There’s a lot to squeeze into this little box!
Incidentally, I love the way I can enter something like “1.3” for an octave and a minor third in that transpose box, and how the range boxes are equally happy with “A4” or 69, depending on how you like to work.
Hi Brad
Neil explains exactly what I need. But I’m looking for even a faster way to change octave. There is a shortcut button/midicommand for quickly transposing up or down in semitones without textbox, cool! Like Neil I need to transpose in octaves much more frequently than in semitones. Because my controller-keyboard does not have the option to do so, and for some other usb-midicontrollers ist very complicated to transpose in octaves (only with a software editor), octave buttons would be a great feature.
I needed this very thing yesterday. I wanted to transpose my electric pianos rack up one octave via a midi button from my nanKontrol2 but couldn’t figure out if it was possible. At the moment I can only open the dialogue box on the input route to the rack and click/unclick the filter I made there. Am I missing something here though? If not, the ability to do this would be very welcome.
A simple approach would be to make a “Transpose rack” where the input goes directly to the output, and has a number of states, each with a different transpose setting on that internal route (with state behaviour enabled for transpose).
Then just hook up bindings from your nanoKontrol to the rack state of that rack to go up/down the states (or choose specific states etc).
You can then also re-use this rack wherever you want to use the nanoKontrol to affect transposition of an instrument.
Thanks Neil. I’d managed it using midiTransposer (from the guy who wrote JBridge) but your rack suggestion is better so I tried it this afternoon. For the moment I just need to raise my Rhodes rack one octave at times but the rack idea means I can add other transpositions if needed.
For the bindings I wanted to use one button on the nanoKontrol set on ‘toggle’ so that it lit up red when the octave higher state was switched on. The only way I managed to get this to work was to have one binding inside the transposer rack set to ‘RackStates- next index’, and a main binding set to ‘Select State by Index’ to return it to the opening position (no octave). I don’t know if there’s another way but it works fine so I’m happy!
