If I can be of any help, let me know!
Re. defining your own ornaments, with especial respect to trill-type things: would it be possible to allow users to construct composite ornament glyphs? The ornament palette you posted has several different trill-type images: squiggly line; longer squiggly line; squiggly line with Nachschlag; squiggly line with Nachschlag and starting with curvy line going up; squiggly line with Nachschlag and starting with curvy line going down; longer squiggly line with Nachschlag and starting with curvy line going up; etc. etc. etc… Since Dorico is semantically based, wouldn’t it make sense for the user to be able to construct in an editor, say, something like “trill of 4 squiggles with Nachschlag starting with curvy line going up with a sharp centered above it”? This has the potential to make the ornament palette much smaller. More intriguingly, this would also allow easy definition of playback for composite ornaments—Dorico could just construct the playback itself by building it up from what it knows each segment of the ornament means, just like real musicians do.
However, I anticipate that this pipe dream is beyond the scope of reality… yes? no? Fingers crossed…
It would certainly be possible to allow you to construct your own composite ornaments, yes. When we eventually have a user interface for defining these things, I would expect this to be possible.
Included should be the ability to define for playback: where each segment starts and ends, the rhythm of each segment, whether a trill begins with the principal or auxiliary note, and if the first or last notes of the entire ornament are to be tied to a previous or following note.
Is playback the thing holding up implementation of figured bass? If so, I’d like to vote for its implementation even without playback.
No, it’s nothing specific that is holding it up, merely a matter of relative priority and how we choose to spend our limited development time.
I can’t really imagine Dorico, or any other software, implementing playback of figured bass. It seems too complicated, and there are too many possibilities. Listen to a few continuo players play the same figured bass part, and hear how differently each one plays it — how would Dorico manage something like that?
Are there plans for Dorico to handle playback of figured bass in the future?
As long as Dorico will provide playback of chords, I don’t see why it won’t do the same for figured bass. I would expect the playback aspect of both these features to be pretty rudimentary, though.
A basic “three parts in the right hand and one in the left” realization isn’t difficult. People have been writing software to complete 4-part harmony exercises without making too many egregious errors for decades. Texts like CPE Bach’s book explain the “rules of thumb” pretty well.
You don’t need to generate the playback on the fly, you only need to update it when edit the figuring. And unlike a live realization, you can backtrack if you paint yourself into a corner.
Nice there are some more ornaments. Still there are errors like tremblement appuyé, not represented by the right symbol. I can help if you want.
Please do help. The more specific the feedback you give, the better placed I will be to ensure that the correct ornaments are added, and correctly described.