A Few Bugs

[JulianBennettHolmes]

Hello,

In my couple months of using it, I’m finding Dorico to be really excellent, and I’m using it for most of my work now. However, I’d like to report a few small bugs I’ve found. (I’m using MacOS 10.12.3, the latest version, as well as Dorico 1.0.30.)

1. Some windows (the Transpose window, for example), have red “close” buttons in the window bar, but cannot be closed with the command-W shortcut.

2. There seems to be a small bug in drawing the bracket that encloses a group of staves on the left side of each page. The bracket seems to be drawn by combining three shapes: a straight vertical bar, and two little “hooks” at the top and bottom. However, if I zoom in, I can sometimes see that these shapes don’t quite “connect,” and that there’s a pixel or so of white space between them. This is obviously a very minor bug, and it doesn’t show up when printing or exporting as a PDF, but I thought I should report it anyway.
   (I’ve attached an example image.)

3. When Dorico splits music into systems, it sometimes allows text, such as tempo indications, to hang into the right margin. This looks incorrect to me. In the attached example, it looks to me like Dorico should have forced the last measure of the second system onto the following system, so that the “rallentando e crescendo” text wouldn’t hang into the margin.
   (See attachment.)

4. When exporting audio, Dorico just gives me a “spinning beach ball” for thirty seconds or so, until the export is complete. Shouldn’t it display a progress bar instead?

5. Dorico sometimes unexpectedly quits when switching between modes (Write, Engrave, etc.) with command-key shortcuts.

Thanks,
Julian Bennett Holmes

[dspreadbury]

1. Some windows (the Transpose window, for example), have red “close” buttons in the window bar, but cannot be closed with the command-W shortcut.

That’s true, and we can probably change the way dialog windows are set up to remove the traffic lights in due course.

2. There seems to be a small bug in drawing the bracket that encloses a group of staves on the left side of each page. The bracket seems to be drawn by combining three shapes: a straight vertical bar, and two little “hooks” at the top and bottom. However, if I zoom in, I can sometimes see that these shapes don’t quite “connect,” and that there’s a pixel or so of white space between them. This is obviously a very minor bug, and it doesn’t show up when printing or exporting as a PDF, but I thought I should report it anyway.

The tiny gap is actually caused by anti-aliasing rather than there being a real gap between the end of the thick bracket line and the hook, which is drawn using a glyph from the font. You can adjust the ‘Additional vertical protrusion beyond top or bottom of staff’ option on the Brackets and Braces page of Engraving Options to largely eliminate this anti-aliasing artifact; the default value of 1/4 space should do it.

3. When Dorico splits music into systems, it sometimes allows text, such as tempo indications, to hang into the right margin. This looks incorrect to me. In the attached example, it looks to me like Dorico should have forced the last measure of the second system onto the following system, so that the “rallentando e crescendo” text wouldn’t hang into the margin.

In due course we hope to make the casting off algorithm aware of these sorts of things.

When exporting audio, Dorico just gives me a “spinning beach ball” for thirty seconds or so, until the export is complete. Shouldn’t it display a progress bar instead?

Yes, of course. This is listed as a known issue in the version history document, though you’re forgiven for not spotting it! We do hope to improve this in the near future, but it’s surprisingly complicated because of the threading model and the fact that the engine is running in a separate process.

Dorico sometimes unexpectedly quits when switching between modes (Write, Engrave, etc.) with command-key shortcuts.

Can you zip up and attach the crash logs relevant to Dorico and the VSTAudioEngine that you find in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter (the tilde at the start of the path indicates that this is the Library folder inside your user folder, not the Library folder in the root of your boot volume).

[JulianBennettHolmes]

@Daniel at Steinberg

The tiny gap is actually caused by anti-aliasing rather than there being a real gap between the end of the thick bracket line and the hook, which is drawn using a glyph from the font. You can adjust the ‘Additional vertical protrusion beyond top or bottom of staff’ option on the Brackets and Braces page of Engraving Options to largely eliminate this anti-aliasing artifact; the default value of 1/4 space should do it.

That fixed it — thanks!

@Daniel at Steinberg

When exporting audio, Dorico just gives me a “spinning beach ball” for thirty seconds or so, until the export is complete. Shouldn’t it display a progress bar instead?

Yes, of course. This is listed as a known issue in the version history document, though you’re forgiven for not spotting it! We do hope to improve this in the near future, but it’s surprisingly complicated because of the threading model and the fact that the engine is running in a separate process.

That makes sense — in the future, will there also be options for the bitrate of the exported MP3? And also, it would be really great if Dorico could automatically add ID3 tags to the exported MP3, since it already has information about title, composer, year, etc. from the “Project Info.”

@Daniel at Steinberg

Dorico sometimes unexpectedly quits when switching between modes (Write, Engrave, etc.) with command-key shortcuts.

Can you zip up and attach the crash logs relevant to Dorico and the VSTAudioEngine that you find in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter (the tilde at the start of the path indicates that this is the Library folder inside your user folder, not the Library folder in the root of your boot volume).

Unfortunately, there aren’t any Dorico or VSTAudioEngine logs in this folder. I should have mentioned in my original post that, when Dorico quits in this circumstance, I never get the dialog saying that Dorico “Unexpectedly Quit” or crashed — it just immediately quits as if I’d quit it myself.

[dspreadbury]

The audio engine does allow us to set ID3 tags and to control the bitrate of the exported MP3 file, so we are just missing some user interface to set this stuff up. Hopefully we’ll get to this soon.

If you encounter that Dorico quits unexpectedly again, perhaps open up the Console app and take a look to see if anything interesting is written in there that might be suggestive of what happened.