Yes, exactly.
Unfortunately, no, the buttons don’t have lights.
We could/might make a button expander that has full-color lights but that would be a different module. It gets complicated and confusing pairing buttons and lights and the more we pursued that way of doing it, the more complicated the user interface got (e.g. you have to manually create “Light mappings” separate from “Button mappings” since buttons and their corresponding lights aren’t paired in any consistent way across modules). The cost would be higher as well, so we opted to make something that hits most use cases: just buttons.
We do have support for this. When you make a button mapping, it’s the same as when you make a MIDI button mapping: you can choose between toggle mode or normal (press=on, release=off).
These are possible… though a lot of questions how this works, but in theory you could map Long-Press button to something different than normal tap. You would have to sacrifice latency of course since when you press a button there’s no way it can know if this is the start of a Long Press or if this is going to be a short press or double-tap etc. So the buttons would not be responsive until a certain time has passed and the MM can determine what kind of press this is. So, obviously not suitable for triggering drums, but probably OK if the buttons are used for change modes or selecting the active bank or something.
That’s a pretty good idea. Also – you can make a MIDI map and a normal button map to the same control, so even without any new features if you wanted to share a patch that has button expander mappings then you could layer MIDI mappings on top.
But some way to automatically do this would save time.