A way to avoid destroying my composition if I'm noodling on the MIDI keyboard

I’m coming to Dorico from Sibelius and before that Finale. I use notation software primarily for composing and experimenting, not typesetting existing music. I like to play on my keyboard for a bit, enter some notes, play some more, etc. For Finale and Sibelius, I had them set to “pitch before duration” so that a computer keyboard press was required for each note. The reason is that if it were set to “duration before pitch” and I forget to turn off note input before noodling on my piano, I would enter hundreds of notes and destroy what’s there.

With Dorico, I tried setting it to pitch before duration. It seemed to work at first (requiring a keyboard press), but after I had made some more edits such as adding a time sig, when I started to play at the keyboard it entered every note. (I hadn’t changed any note entry preferences, just selected a couple different tools in the meantime.)

Is there a foolproof way to prevent striking a note on the MIDI keyboard from entering it? I know I can turn off note entry, but I’m likely to forget that sometimes and the result would be destroying my score.

You can set pitch before duration as your default in the application Preferences, and I think it should stick unless you explicitly turn it off.

I did set pitch before duration but it still enters every MIDI keyboard press.

You set it here, and you still get every note entered when you play the keyboard?

In Write mode, K switches between pitch-first and duration-first input, so make sure you didn’t accidentally hit that key.

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I see it now. There’s a button on the Toolbox palette (also shortcut K as you mention) that switches between pitch-first and duration-first. I have no idea why it’s in the preferences dialog if it can be changed from a button on the regular toolbox plus a shortcut key. Anyway, making sure that’s off fixed it.

One is the default behaviour when you open a document, the other is what you want right now.

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