I change the position of a user-created Playing Technique from Above to Below in the Playing Technique editor. The black star remains black, so I am not sure how to save the change as the new default. So I unblackened it and then reblackened it to try to save the change. But that didn’t seem to work when viewed in the Library Manager. The old default is still in effect and the item shows as red.
So I tried combining changing the position from above to below in the editor with changing the star from black to non-black to black.
Some of the changes stuck as shown in the Library manager:
No idea what is going on. What is the correct way to make a change to a Playing Technique and make it the default? Why doesn’t the star become non-black when a change is made?
You’re right that the star icon should become unfilled when you edit a playing technique that is present in the user library such that it no longer matches the saved appearance. Not all of the editing dialogs do that (there’s no good user-facing reason for this, only boring internal technical ones). It should certainly be sufficient, though, to manually remove the playing technique from the user library and then re-add it.
Don’t forget that the changes you make in this way will only affect newly-created projects, unless you manually import the changes from the updated user library via the Library Manager.
Following your suggestion, I duplicated the Playing Technique in its altered state by using New from Selection and that changed default for the duplicated Playing Technique. However I now wonder when to use that approach and when not to.
If the star remains filled in after something is changed in the Playing Techniques editor, does that mean that it will not be saved as a default even if one unfills and then refills the star? Or is it less straight-forward? And is this limitation only for Playing Techniques?
I don’t understand how I managed to change the defaults for some of these nearly identical Playing Techniques but not others by clicking and unclicking the star and changing from Over to Under and. back etc.
There are a few other areas, like Paragraph Styles for example, where I find it unclear exactly how and when the Save as Default star works. You can always make the change, or confirm whether the change was made correctly, by opening your userlibrary.xml file which will contain any Playing Techniques that you have used with the Save as Default star. In that file search for PlayingTechniqueAppearanceDefinition which will take you to the section with your playing technique defaults. The defaultPlacement setting for each should either be kAbove or kBelow. I sometimes find it easier to just make the edit there, and then I know it’s been done correctly.
(Playing Technique definitions that you have not yet saved with the star are contained in the factory scorelibrary.xml file.)
This userlibrary.xml file is intriguing. Where would that be? And if that is an exported library (.doricolib) file, how does one open it? Mine doesn’t.
It’s in the same folder with all of your user settings, including your preferences.xml file, the application logs, etc. On PC it’s at Users\yournamehere\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 5. On Mac it looks like that should be Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 5 but I can’t check that to confirm.
You can open the userlibrary.xml file with any text editor. I use SublimeText, but there are a zillion other alternatives. I sorta enjoy peeking under the hood to see what Dorico is doing, but obviously that’s not officially supported. It’s of course a good idea to back up your userlibrary.xml first before making any edits, in case you get the syntax wrong and break something.
As for text editors, according to John Barron in one of his live-stream Dorico videos, the Dorico team recommends Visual Studio Code (free) for this kind of editing.
