I’ve taken the liberty of editing your thread title, since the behaviour you describe isn’t a bug, though there is certainly a disconnect between your expectation about how the software should work and how it actually works.
When you click the star button to save a playing technique as a default, you’re saving the current state of that playing technique to your user library: if you make subsequent changes to that playing technique, it doesn’t compare the current playing technique in the project against the version in your user library. The star really only indicates that the playing technique with the matching identifier is present in the user library.
It’s certainly possible we could change this in future, but it’s not something that I anticipate us changing imminently.
In the meantime, you will find that if you deactivate the star button and then activate it again, the playing technique (or whatever library item you had previously saved as default) will be removed from your user library and then added again.
You can also use the new Library Manager dialog to compare the state of a given library item between the current project and your user library, and update the item in your current project if need be.
If it’s not a bug, it’s at least very inconsistent with the behavior of the “Paragraph Styles” dialog: there the star is grayed out when you do changes. You have two dialogs that look and behave the same, but the star behavior is different, which makes no sense. While I don’t like the design, at least the grayed out star helped the user to understand what’s going on. It should be implemented in the Playing Techniqes too.
No. I had tried that, and it didn’t work. I’ve checked again and I can confirm that it doesn’t.
I’ve double-checked this again this morning and when you deactivate the star, the playing technique is indeed removed from your user library. If you’re looking at the user library XML file yourself, you’ll see that the actual file on disk is only updated when the dialog is confirmed, but the item in the library is updated correctly.
You are very probably already aware of this, but please allow me to provide the following clarification in case it is helpful to you or somebody else who later reads this thread: when you make a library item a saved default, that choice only affects new projects you create after saving it as a default; it will not update that playing technique in any other project in which it may already appear. If you make a change to one of your default library items that you then want to bring into another existing project, you can use the Library Manager to import the updated item from your user library (or indeed another project) into that existing project.
Yes, if you deactivate the star and you hit “Ok”, the playing technique is removed from the library. However, if you just click and then re-click the star, it won’t be removed and re-applied. You said before:
and that would indeed be useful to change the properties of something that is already a default, but it does not work.
You have to deselect the item, click ok, re-open the editor, re-select the star, and then click “Ok”. Which is obviously not comfortable.
In other words, there is no quick and intuitive way to change the properties of a “user-defaulted” item.
@Derrek … … the point of the thread is to point out a bug (inconsistency between “Playing Techniques” panel and “Paragraph Styles” panel - in one the star gets grayed out, in the other it doesn’t), and a bad design (confusing star behavior and editing).
It’s an older thread I know but I didn’t want to make a new one
I have to agree with @Suilebis and disagree with @Derrek. Looking at other software this feels very unintuitive. I too trust the development team but would vote for another way of saving as default. Especially because Dorico is so good at a lot things where Finale really sucks…
