Hi Jesse, I fully understand your issue! As you know, the reason for the mess is that channel numbers are usually referred to as 1…16, but in the actual MIDI message, they are 0…15 (a 4-bit nibble).
Why won’t we just always treat channels as 1…16 in the program? The issue is with variables. If you set a variable to the channel number, or set the channel to the value of a variable, it would cause much more confusion if the variable was in the range 1…16. So we tried to make clear that the program operates with 0…15, but in the ‘human display’, it is 1…16.
So here, you’re really setting the channel to 3 (because MT Pro operates on 0…15), but the display is ‘Channel 4’.
Now I understand that this way is not ideal. I also think that making it an option how to display channels will not solve much, because we cannot change the fact that MT Pro expects channel variables in the range 0…15. Only displaying channels in the range 1…16 will just ask for confusion when a user starts using variables for channels.
I am very open for a new way to let the user select e.g. ‘Channel 4’, but at the same time making sure the user can see that internally, this is the number 3.
Any suggestions?
@mwesse, I fully agree!! With the current project file format, this cannot be changed (Rules are saved in a tokenized format), but the next major version of MT Pro will have a new file format anyway. It will just save the Rules sections as plain text as typed – with all formatting.
See also: Keep number representation in hexadecimal format