Almost impossible to find options

Either I’m going blind and can’t see what is right there in front of me or my mind works so different from the developers?
This really annoys me about Dorico. It is next to impossible to find options. Far too many items are found in the craziest of places. I have a long list of items. I’ve gone through EVERY option menu (under the Library tab and program settings) and I cannot find anything about midi quantization. I’m trying to INPUT notes on my midi keyboard and want to quantize input to 16th notes. The help file has this in several places in one form or another.

“You have set the quantization options in the MIDI Quantize Options dialog as appropriate for the music you intend to record.”

NOWHERE on those help pages does it give me any clue whatsoever as to where to find the MIDI quantize options. Why aren’t they in the NOTE INPUT settings where any logical mind would go first to find them? (I am INPUTTING notes after all). I’d even settle for them being in the playback settings, but they ain’t there.

The best I seem to be able to do is re-quantize after I’ve done note INPUT via my midi keyboard. That’s an extra step.

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If this is what you are looking for, it’s under the main Preferences dialog:

I Google “Dorico midi quantize options” and top of the list I get…

Google is your friend, but just check the version number it returns.

This is missing from the Dorico 4 documentation because it needs a fair amount of attention due to functionality changes around MIDI import since 3.5, which I’m working on at the moment, as it happens. It’ll be updated as soon as possible, with apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime.

You can also use the jump bar to locate within options dialogs across the app.

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I did not know that the jump bar could do that. I did find it yesterday after I got home from a performance. As to searching Google I’ve ended up being sent to version 1.1 or 2.2 documentation that is outdated. I wrote the following offline and I’ll go ahead and post it even though I’ve found the answer. Maybe it will help others. Maybe it will help the developers to see things from a different perspective.

Go to preferences. Search for “MIDI.” Nothing found. Search for “Quantize.” Nothing found. Search for note input. Nothing in that section pertains to quantization. Searching in the other options didn’t find how to change midi quantization on note input via midi keyboard.

After going through every item in preferences I finally found it buried, in of all places, the Play options. This is where I’m beginning to think my mind is messed up. Play options in a notation program, for me at least, refers to playing back what has already been entered into the notation. For my mind, the most logical place for anything to do with midi input is in “note input” or marginally acceptable, a “midi” section that deals with anything to do with midi (including note input). If I’m looking for “How to input notes via MIDI,” the action involved is “input” not play. That said, if the preferences search had shown me results for “midi” or “quantize” I would have found it quicker and wouldn’t have posted on the forum. Perhaps the developers could explain the logic behind putting an obvious INPUT option in the PLAY options.

As to searching the online help. Two minutes to go through the first two pages of search results for “midi quantize.” That search gave me 98 results. Only the first 3 or 4 results included the word quantize. None of the first two pages got me any closer to finding out how to set the midi quantize settings, although mention was made that you should set that before recording. None of the remaining results included the word quantize so I gave up using the online help. Even searching for the phrase “Midi quantize options” used in the help document returned nothing.

Dorico is a good program and I’m leaning 60/40 in favor of switching. There are three things so far that bother me, two of which I have come to rely on in other notation programs. The first is the difficulty in quickly finding settings. In another program there were really only two places I needed to go to find most everything (although that program isn’t nearly as complex as dorico). Second is the ability to “renotate performance” to make it more legible. This mainly applies to keyboard music to automatically move notes from one staff to the other based on a split point (fixed or smart) and clean up the rhythm and voice notation. Finally, I transcribe a lot of piano or organ music. If I’m recording both staffs at once, dorico is good - very good - at separating rhythm differences in both clefs so I get stems up/stems down in the same bar of the same staff if called for. However, I tend to record just the right hand and just the left hand for piano music. That requires going into note input which only records into one voice/stem direction. I really need it to separate voices/stem directions during recording. Having to edit it after it’s been inpputed only slows the process down.

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I went to Dorico Help, and searched for “quantize” and found this.
Note the third bullet point.

I didn’t see it. However, the quantize settings are NOT in the recording section, they are actually in their own section, above the recording section. Inconsistent terminology and documentation slows down my workflow considerably. Even so, why in the world do they put INPUT settings in the PLAY settings? It makes absolutely no sense at all. If they had put the settings in the INPUT section where it belongs, I would have never needed to consult the help and would have accomplished what I needed in a short amount of time. It’s just wasted time looking for things that aren’t where logic says they should be. The logic just baffles me why something dealing with Input is in the Play settings. Absurd.

This is clearly in flux. In 3.5 and earlier the quantization settings were within the Recording section (albeit in a separate dialog), like so:

As Lillie explained here, various things to do with Play and Playback haven’t yet been updated for Dorico 4.

If I use this dialog, Dorico still notates 32th notes if I set quantization units to 16th. So input quantization simply seems to be not working! The idea should be that Dorico cuts everything beneath 16th …

When you play notes that are clearly below the quantization threshold, Dorico prefers to notate those notes rather than omit them entirely.

Welcome to the Forum, @pifrei .

Can you requantize the notes afterwards?