Sustain/Hold

Have just started using MouseKeyboard and find it really great - thank you!

I use sustain and hold commands a lot in building up sound tracks and it is good to see these functions built into MouseKey however there is a couple of improvements that could make the sustain function a lot more user friendly.

1. When using SUSTAIN on multiple keys, the keys that you have depressed don't visually stay depressed even though the note is played, this makes it difficult to quickly remember which keys you have depressed. Is it possible when in sustain mode to keep keys showing as depressed?

2. It would be great if while in sustain mode you could un-depress certain notes so you could slowly "undo" the buildup of your soundtrack.

I'm not sure if I have made the above requests very clearly, but if you have a look at the virtual keyboard in Native Instruments Absynth 3.0 it does exactly the above and is very handy

Thanks again for a top peice of software and really hope you consder making the above enhancements.

Hi ADB,

thanks for the request. Do you mean MIDI sustain? I.e. controller 64 or so?

Re 1: I don't think it's correct to show released keys as pressed when sustain is active -- after all, on a real piano they keys will be up, too.

Re 2: The MIDI sustain does not allow to selectively remove notes from a sustain (just as the sustain pedal on a real piano works). So I cannot add such a feature to MK.

However... I could add a manual sustain mode (similar to using Ctrl+Mouse click) where you can build up a chord, the keys will stay down, and you can selectively remove keys from the chord. MIDI-wise it'll work very differently, but it should have the same effect. I'll add this to the feature request list.

Regards,
Florian

Thanks for your reply Florian,

Yes if you could By-pass the normal MIDI conventions that would be great because as you state you can't selectively "unsustain" certain keys via MIDI but if a Manual mode was introduced that would be great.

If the enhancement lets you:-
- build up chords by progressively holding multiple keys
- shows the keys pressed and remaining pressed on MouseKeyboard
- then allows you to release individual keys
- and have all this recorded as MIDI data it would be great!

Essentially I guess then its not a substitute for sustain but an easier way to selectively and progressively hold down more keys than you potential have fingers!

Cheers
Andrew