[sfx]

Something I noticed today while experimenting with PICO-8 sound effects: in 0.2.0i, if a silent (volume=0) row immediately before a non-silent row with an SFX instrument has the same SFX instrument as its instrument (e.g. if the user shift-clicked the SFX instrument to set the entire SFX to that instrument), even though the UI shows no difference, the program sometimes plays the SFX differently. (It looks like the effect lasts as long as the nominal length of the SFX instrument - 32 times its SPD.)

I assume this is a bug in how SFX instruments are implemented; if it's not, it strikes me as a bug in how the information is displayed.

Going through my old bug reports to close any that no longer apply, and decided to make a mockup of a possible version of my proposal here:

This uses the same convention as arpeggios with silent notes: on the lines where a custom SFX instrument is playing silently, the UI displays which note on which instrument is being played. Thus, if I want to use this deliberately in a song, the fact that I'm doing so is immediately apparent and I know that it relies on those lines where no sound is produced.