Steal Music programs ideas

I've used music programs for decades and there's a bunch of standard features for recording that I think could be put straight in Unity. Especially good for animation (but they're also a good source of inspiration for other things)
eg I use these regularly

• Realtime recording, with looping and multiple takes. Different speed realtime recording. Simply hitting record and it recording any dragged value, with 'turn into curve' clean up options. I actually find it bizarre that a realtime medium like animation doesn't DEFAULT to realtime. Imagine a music program that didn't allow realtime playing?
• "Midi Learn". Right click ANY value and assign to hardware sliders with zero setup. Assign ANY editor function to any midi button/piano key. Imagine how much quicker animation could be with all the great midi controllers out there.
• "Step" recording for auto incrementing timeline per keyframe. Fully keyboardable.
  • The ultimate step recorders are 'trackers' which are basically a 100% keyboardable driven timeline. It's amazing how much faster some tasks are with the keyboard. eg having an actual cursor like a text editor, controlled by arrows, which allows you to do things like hitting insert to push all the proceeding keyframe right a bit, hold shift for select, basically all the good things about text editors in a timeline.
• "Step realtime". Have the timeline pause UNTIL you move a slider or drag a value, then it records realtime until you stop moving. With loop points and takes, this could be a powerful way to get a more precise realtime input, without it coming out too 'motion capturey'. This is my idea which I don't think exists, but I wish did.
• Always recording. Less useful for Unity maybe but some record ALL THE TIME into a rolling buffer. Why not? Animation data is nothing in memory usage. This is great for constantly puppeting/playing and stumbling across a good movement. You then just hit 'paste last x seconds'

 

I'd also be happy if they stole a lot of DAW functionality, and not just for audio. Recording ragdolls could be useful to get the "best take" for a fun death animation

MIDI controls, especially wheels, could be used for a lot of things. Just supporting MIDI input and making it an API option in the editor would open up for extensions which do something interesting with them. Maybe the new input system could make that a possibility.

 

The Unity dev who works on the Post stack, also does his own MIDI input plugins and Unity utilities. If the core Unity widgets supported Midi learn, it'd be an easy and massive control improvement. That combined with simply recording keyframes realtime would suddenly be the best animation system avaliable. You could even easily hookup mocap devices with no native support.
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