You know to be honest, it’s not even a knock against MusAnalysis itself- it’s how it has to work within Dorico as a kind of workaround, which is no fault of your own. FWIW I think MusAnalysis is an elegant workaround all things considered!
For example, using it as a “lyric” has limitations for me – I’ve found it will only let me add “lyrics” based on the note durations in the bar. Sometimes when I’m working on a writing exercise, I actually want to plan out my harmonic movement first before entering any pitches (for example, entering my cadence first, let’s just say ii6 V I for example). If I want these to move by quarter notes, I have to manually enter quarter note rests by turning on force duration. But then the lyrics popover won’t really let me go left to right with the arrow keys unless there are real pitches in the bar (it otherwise ignores rests). I’m just saying that it requires a bit of hacking to get it right.
Similarly, sometimes I want to add my analysis to the bottom of a bar, which may or may not have any music on it (for example, on a full score, if I wanted to add roman numerals at the top or bottom of each system). The lyrics popover always forces them to be kind of in-between bars and it gets lost. Sure, I can fix this in engraving, but it’s a bit of a pain.
Also, if I change my default Lyric font to MusAnalysis, it overrides regular lyrics – and it would be ideal if you could even have lyrics AND roman numeral analysis at the same time.
Maybe there are ways to fix these behaviors in Dorico, but I think my larger point is that it’s a workaround. So again, that’s not a problem with MusAnalysis – you’ve made a workable solution which is actually quite impressive! But I’d love to see a native solution where Roman Numeral Analysis were fully supported by the program as a regular feature rather than something I have to hack about with. (And hey, if they do that, I’d love if MusAnalysis could be the font of choice!)
One easy solution for some of that is to enter note input mode with the caret, and then Shift-L at any rhythmic position! You can enter a lyric anywhere, even if there isn’t a note.
And I agree I’d love to see RNA as well. Although having worked on it with this font, the possibilities are daunting. Functional analysis included.
Ah ok. It still doesn’t let me tab left/right unless there are pitches there, but that’s good to know. I guess my larger point is a separated “data stream” of RNA would be beneficial in the end, rather than a workaround, even though the workaround is great
While we’re here (apologies to hijack this thread), I made MusAnalysis my default Lyric font awhile ago but now every project has this warning message when I open it. Any ideas how I can fix it?
Yes, somewhere you have an “italic” version assigned to a paragraph or font style. Since there is no italic version, Dorico is convinced you need to know about this.
I use MusAnalysis a lot – much better than Campania and thank you SO MUCH. But it’d be really cool to have this functionality for functional analysis built into Dorico. I suspect it’s in the plan…
I also update “with my eyes closed” to give support to the developers. they are the resource of the quality of my daily work. moreover, their constant presence here, and the attention they have for users, is priceless. as soon as i get home tonight i will buy the upgrade!
Yeah I’m much more curious about that one. It’ll be lots of humanizing improvement which is great (according to the blog), will they go as far as phrase recognition with duration adjustment, and dare I hope, mild rubato?
@dspreadbury I must confess myself disappointed that there were no hidden gems like this in the 5.0.20 version history. Please consider this a feature request.
