Tracker view for Piano Roll

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Every now and then for the past 10 years I'm looking for a (modern) tracker. I just can't get used to the horizontal visual style of composing melodies. In my experience, it's easier to be creative in a tracker.

LMMS has a beautiful sound engine and awesome instruments/synths. Every other thing is well designed. The biggest leap forward right now would be a Tracker mode for Piano Roll.

I have made some attempts in the past, but C++ just isn't my forte, although it is what makes LMMS so strong.

_[SchismTracker](https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker), an Impulse Tracker clone_

There are some limitations of course in the structure of a Tracker view compared to Piano Roll.

The most obvious problem is that note based technology doesn't lend itself for all the sample-based functionality like sample cutoff and offsets, at least not in a way that could realistically fit in the LMMS data structure without reimplementing things. The (ancient) _Impulse Tracker_ midi-only clone _[zTracker](https://github.com/cmicali/ztracker/tree/master/src)_ solved this by simply removing all sample-based features, and implementing note-off rather than cut-off.

The second problem is that trackers store the position of a note inside a pattern on a specific channel, and LMMS has no concept of channels in the same way, as the entire pattern could be one channel. The piano roll is a "bag of notes" with no concept of on what channel the note was stored. A solution would be to allow one instrument per pattern, like the piano roll. Although this would only fix the problem of mixed instruments that would make the pattern incompatible with a piano roll, the spatial placement of notes over channels is still incompatible.

For that reason, it could make sense to have a Tracker View that is _backward compatible_ with (can be converted to) a Piano Roll, but not the other way around. This would also solve the problem that Piano Roll has tick based precision, while a Tracker view has only row-based precision (depending on speed/tempo), for things like volume corrections. This is similar to the Bassline Editor compared to the Piano Roll.

I.e. a non-Piano-Roll-bassline from the Bassline Editor can be converted to a Tracker View. A Tracker View pattern can be converted to a Piano Roll. Both steps increase the precision, so there is no converting back.

Bassline Editor < Tracker View < Piano Roll

Note that this is not a complete Tracker, just a Tracker-like alternative to the Piano Roll. I'm sure a lot of creative folks from a certain era would love this.

Begin by locating the existing Piano Roll and Bassline Editor implementations and understanding their data models and conversion behavior. Done would require a scoped Tracker View design that addresses row-based notes, channels, sample-based limitations, and conversion to Piano Roll.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.