Bug fix - Lasso over-selecting regardless of zoom-level?

This happens to me quite often, where a lasso (marquee) selection clearly over-selects nearby notes that are definitely outside of the lasso selection area:

dorico lasso over selection

For the record I’m zoomed wayyy in for this, and it doesn’t make a difference.

The second time I go to select, I’m even more on the edge of the notes I want - notice how in the lowest and middle staves it doesn’t select the last tied note, but weirdly it does for all the other same tied notes which are in the exact same rhythmic position and lasso selection area!

Fortunately my workaround for now is to shift+right arrow on the top staff to select those first two 16ths, and then I can shift+down arrow to quickly select all the others. That method works ok.

However I would like to have improved selection sensitivity/resolution when making selections like this – especially when zoomed in really close where it should work. Thanks!

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For some (unknown) reason, I have much better results when I try to marquee select from the bottom right corner of the rectangle instead of the top left one. It’s worth trying that.

Interesting. However in my case I just tried it and got the same result as above!

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Try from quite a vertical distance below the p. I don’t know why, but if you’re near the staff, thhe whole bar is picked up :person_shrugging:

Same result… I tried as far away as possible and it still happens. I also tried zoomed out, and from all four possible corners! It’s consistent in that regard.

Does this sort of thing not occur to you (or others)? It happens to me very often with these kind of close-to-each-other note values!

I must say I was really relieved when the system track arrived… In Dorico 1, marquee select was the only way to make a selection (apart from shift-clicking) :scream::exploding_head:

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Yeah, I enjoy the system track - although the issue I’m running into (and just ran into again right now at another part) is for when trying to select only a few staves in a larger orchestral work, where obviously the system track wouldn’t help me there.

Well, if you use the instrument filter in galley view, and the alt key to get smaller bits than whole bars with the select track, you should succeed!

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Your selection includes the beam, and selecting the beam will select all the notes in the beam.

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Unfortunately, that doesn’t entirely explain the second one where the box area is the same, but two out of five staves with the same rhythms didn’t get selected (also beamed). Also, sometimes, it works totally fine, here I am selecting small note values which are part of separate beams:

random selections

As you can see here, I select different notes which belong to adjacent beams, lassoing from different angles, and most of the time it works as expected - except the very last one, you’ll see it did select one stray note outside the box area (in the bottom staff).

Nevertheless, is the only option to shift click or perform a filter operation first? It would be nice if the lasso selections could select only what is inside the box which I think makes the most sense in this context (draw an area around what you want selected exactly). Thanks!

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Stem direction seems to make a difference in the results of your selections. No idea why.

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I’ve also been experiencing this. At first I thought I was just being sloppy in my selections but your gifs clearly show that there is some degree of unpredictability.

Concerning the presence of beams in the selection, even if that would explain all of the behavior in the gifs (which it doesn’t, as @wing already pointed out) I really hope that that premise (selecting a beam will select all the notes in the beam) can be dropped as a whole for marquee selection or at least be made customizable. I find that extremely unuseful because it essentially makes it impossible to use marquee selection for vertical selections as soon as any beamed notes are involved. It also makes it unnecessarily fussy to select e.g. 3 out of 4 noteheads under a beam, as you always have to be careful not to hit the beam with the selection box. I also don’t get the necessity of such behavior - if I want to select all notes under a beam, I simply click the beam. Whenever I use marquee it’s almost always because I want to select just specific parts/notes and not entire beamed groups.

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I use the lasso always together with the Control-key. Example:


The three vertical groups of orange notes were created with 3 lasso movements, that selected exactly what I wanted.
And as @MarcLarcher indicated: I always select from bottom to top, it seems to give less “false” selections.
I hope it helps you :).

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On Windows PC ?
On Mac, we have the Control-key, and a Command-key, which is the equivalent of Control on PC.
A few details to clarify things, bearing in mind that most of the members of this forum work on Mac.

Yes, exactly – I feel like the primary use case for marquee (in any application) is to isolate a very specific area - obviously drawing a box around only the items which you wish to select.

If I want a more broad selection of the area around notes, I just use beam+click and/or shift+click (which is way faster), and great for broader area selections. And of course shift+click outside notes to select entire measures, or even more broadly the system track selection… marquee, as I am used to in various apps, is when you want to do a more precise, “zoomed in” selection task.

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Unfortunately (at least on mac), I am getting the same selection results with or without the cmd(ctrl) key, and regardless of which side I drag from (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right). Each variation I tested are equally giving false selections.

The only consistency I am observing is exactly what Derrek mentioned above, the stem directions are giving different results.

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Thanks for pointing out. I use both Windows and Mac (and I switched the control keys on my Mac, to match Windows behaviour, because I do most of my work on my Windows machine (it is faster than my Mac Book 2). So, I’m forgetting a bit what Mac users normally experience.
The way of working describes indeed om my Windows machine, although I am fairly sure my Mac does the same behaviour. (I did not test again).

Thanks for the tip!

I actually went a bit mental trying to find some kind of pattern in noteheads being selected outside of the lasso/marquee rectangle. I have not been able to figure out the logic, but I found two things in general:

  • As pointed out earlier in this thread, stem direction does play a role here but that is caused by the stems being on either the left-hand or right-hand side of the notehead. Notes are included in the selection when the rectangle touches the stem ever so slightly, even though the notehead itself is largely outside your selection (and vice versa: you can select almost an entire notehead with the rectangle, but it won’t be included in the selection if the stem is not in there).
    Media1
    I find that to be counterintuitive. I can’t speak for other people but I’m focused at the actual notes (i.e. noteheads) when editing/selecting, not at stems. Also this does not explain the behavior seen in the original post.

  • With groups of e.g. 4 eighths or 4 sixteenths, the selection always turns out as expected (i.e. only noteheads within the selection). For some reason I’m finding the most issues with groups of two sixteenths and one eighth note, like in the OP’s gif.


    I actually recorded a two minute video in which I tried to select only the 2 sixteenth notes in the screenshot above over and over again. I used a third party app to create a grid overlay on my entire screen in order to be able to place my rectange as precisely as possible. Whether one or both of the eighth notes were included in the selection turned out to be completely random, or so it seemed. If there is something causing it, I have not been able to identify it but I’m pretty sure it’s not the positioning of the rectangle. (This was the “going mental” part of my endeavour, I’ll spare you guys the actual video. I actually contemplated doing it a couple more times at different zoom levels but I chose to save my sanity :innocent:). I also did not find the beams to be of particular influence, as can also be seen in the gif above and in @wing 's gif in post #10 in this topic.

I hope a cause (fix?) can be found for this. :slight_smile:

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I have similar experience on Windows. And indeed, for more precise lasso-ing (is that English?), I prefer to zoom in a bit, that helps.

I can’t speak for @Zalde and you can’t necessarily tell by the gifs I posted above but on my 27" Mac Display at 3.5K resolution I was zoomed in like nearly full screen around those notes (~800% in the zoom level at the bottom right) - in other words you could easily read them from across the room! I would hope that such a zoom level would provide me precise selection but then I compared to when zoomed out at ~200% and it was also the same result for me.

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