I’m new to Dorico, having used Guitar Pro 8, so to me, it seems like the below answers to the below questions should be readily available, just not very obvious.
I want to be able to select several bars of music and play them in a continues loop. This is useful for checking rhythm patterns and notes, effects adjustments, etc.
On a secondary note, is there a way to select a measure in the write mode and begin playing from there. I know I can do this in the play mode, but that is rather cumbersome.
I’m amazed that they don’t have a way to play a loop, particularly in the Dorico Pro version that I have.
I have found that their tutorials are not well thought out and finding things in their manual very difficult. I’m sure I’ll be asking more questions on this forum for a long time to come.
If you’re new to Dorico, perhaps you might like to start with our First Steps guide for new users – it follows the process of making a piano piece from start to finish. It was written in 3.5, so the section in Play mode is somewhat out of date, but much of it is still relevant for v4.
Unfortunately at the moment, the Dorico 4 manual doesn’t include the Play mode section, which might be why you weren’t able to find the sorts of information you wanted about playback. Here’s the relevant page from the 3.5 manual.
Lillie,
Thanks for your info. The Play back is kind of tricky, but Dan’s Info and relevant info from the 3.5 manual works. Why tricky? Because you can click on the note and hit the play back button and nothing happens??? Searching for things like short cut keys for a particular function is cumbersome at best. It is, as I’ve noted, a big learning curve and the 3.5 First steps guide should (in my opinion) start with smaller, simpler scores and work up to more complex, detailed ones.
Currently, I’m working without a keyboard, so all my notes are entered manually - which means if I make a mistake in either the note or the notes duration, I have to go back and correct it. I have learned to do that, but I still have lots of questions.
A couple of much shorter and simpler guides already exist – you can find them here; the link is also on the Resources page.
If playback isn’t starting when you press P, it sounds like something else is the issue. Is the project enabled for playback (the power button in the toolbar should be highlighted blue if it is).
It can be also great to use the play ( press P )in real time without latency!
For example a rythmic exercice for student : you say one-two-three-four and press P to start the in time the fragment! allways a latence!
But not sure that other notation software do it without latency
Lillie,
The P key works, but the green play arrow at the top of the write doesn’t start where the note is selected, but rather at where ever it left-off.
If you have any input to the writers of the Dorico software, get them to add loops… it really can’t be that hard to do.
If you are guitarist why to use the mouse to click on play? you can add a midi command to do the same thins as “P” and and keep your hands on your instrument:
Benwiggy… no I don’t write software, however, I have Guitar Pro. All you do there is turn on the loop feature, select the measure you want to loop, push the play button and it will continuously play that selection until you stop it. Dorico does understand repeat markings, so it shouldn’t be to hard to add a selection repeat button i.e. a loop.
I would hope that looping and “scrub playback” would both come relatively soon. These are things that can really help an orchestrator get the voicing right.
(By “scrub playback,” I mean the ability to wipe the mouse over notes and hear them play.)
