Can Dorico play Loops

No. I don’t think you understand. P does something completely different. The scrub mode allows you to quickly find offending notes. You can scrub in any direction, playing backward and forward.

Did you ever use that feature on Finale? If so, I don’t think you would be criticizing it. It remains one of the best features in Finale. Besides, what do you care? If you don’t want it, don’t use it.

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Yes, that’s right, the Play button in the mini transport isn’t exactly the same as the P key command – it’s equivalent to pressing Space instead by default, although you can change that in Preferences. You can also access both options (“play from playhead position” ie where it last stopped, and “play from selection”) in the full Transport window.

Info about the mini transport here, diagram of where to open the Transport window from here.

Lillie,
Thanks, that info was very helpful and I modified the preferences to allow the Play button to work the same as the P - and it worked!

Doug :slight_smile:

Finale’s scrubbing is indeed very useful, e.g. for carefully listening to one chord in a dense orchestration, or for stepping through a harmony. Essential for arranging, composition, and even ‘ear-proofing’ complex passages.

I would certainly welcome it.

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Indeed. And one of the nice things about this is it doesn’t change your current orientation, cursor point or whatever. It is just a super-fast way to get right to something that sounded a little bit off. Here is a description of the Finale feature:

Scrubbing Playback

If you’d like to simply click on any measure to play it back, or would like to quickly hear just one instrument of your score, this is a cool trick.

Hold down two keys (on Windows press Ctrl+Spacebar, on Mac press Option+Spacebar) while you pass the mouse over the area of music you want to scrutinize. As you do you will hear the sonorities involved, with full instrumentation. This action lets you hear only the area you want to hear when you want to hear it.

To hear a single staff, add the Shift key to the other two keys. Now you will hear just one staff at a time as you pass your mouse over your music.

I’ve heard this described as an “Audition” feature as well as “Scrubbing Playback.” No matter what you call it, it’s a time saver.

This is case where Dorico should simply copy the competitive feature unabashedly.

When we do get looping, I expect I’ll be using it constantly, much as I do currently in Cubase.

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I am not a coder and I admire the skill of those who are.
But whether a loop feature is hard or easy to write, given that it is included in virtually every DAW and notation programme, including Sibelius which I understand is where the Dorico designers began life, it must at least be familiar.

My 1p worth:

I find selecting a note, pressing P, then Spacebar when I want to stop, then P to start again works fine.

It’s very very easy to select a start and stop note.

Saves faffing around with Repeat regions (Cubase, Logic, Reaper etc)

So, even if the Dorico developers did find time to implement looping, I doubt I’d make use of it as the P/Spacebar method is so simple. (Which I’m currently doing a lot as I struggle to learn the tenor part in Durufle’s Requiem!)

You’re right of course Martin (welcome to the Forum by the way), but I guess it’s a matter of priorities.

You may be right, but it is quite possible that the different organization of Dorico data behind the scenes make any implementation similar to Sibelius’s (and there is no such capability in Finale) would not be possible.

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Of course it’s possible. Dorico does understand repeat sections and does it all of the time. A loop function is basically the same thing, except it’s more dynamic in that the user says repeat from point A to point B until we say stop.

Doug :slight_smile:

I didn’t say looping was not possible. I said that applying or adapting the Sibelius approach might not be possible.

Unfortunately looping and repeats are completely different things in the implementation. Repeats are about creating a mapping between the notation domain and the ‘unwound’ timeline of events. When evaluating the repeats, Dorico works out the mapping of notation to ‘playback time’. Looping is about changing the mapping between ‘playback time’ and ‘real time’.

This isn’t a trivial task, but we are very aware that it’s a very important feature for the workflows of many users. So it’s something that we want to support in a future version.

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Paul,
Just a thought…

I know nothing about programming, but I have used Guitar Pro for writing music (not anywhere close to Dorico’s ability). However, what they do there for loops is highlight the area one wants to loop and hit play. It will continually loop until one hits stop. It will also hold that highlighted area until another area is selected or the loop button is de-selected. I would think that using a version of the mapping function in Dorico could be used to create the looping function that so many desire.

Doug :slight_smile:

:man_facepalming:t2:

Please, let’s just let the dev. team do what the dev. team does, and not speculate about how things should be coded. They are aware of the request (which has been regular for some time now) and they are also aware of guitar pro, which is frequently referenced here as well.

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Dear Doug. For the last 22 years I have written large parts of the playback systems of Sibelius and then Dorico. Please believe me if I say that if it was that trivially simple, then we would have done it by now. It’s really not possible to conclude anything about how easy or difficult any particular feature would be to implement by comparing it to how it works in other applications.

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If I had a penny for every time a user says, “I’m not a programmer, but…”, I would have quite a few pennies by now :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m going to close this thread for now, since the request is well understood, and any further discussion of how easy or otherwise it may be to implement doesn’t achieve anything.

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