Leaving aside some of the the more philosophical aspects of this thread - f.ex. what is “arbitrary” or not - can I point out that many publishers use a house style where solo voices (f.ex. character names in opera or oratorio (CHERUBINO, JUDAS, IOLE)) are routinely capitalized.
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Good point from @lumortensen – sometimes capitalization may be dependent upon what role the stave takes in the score.
I don’t mean to badger the Dorico team unnecessarily. I will say that, in the course of learning Dorico and getting up and running with it, I came across FAR too many instances of “why is this thing coded this way, why is it controlled over there, and why am I spending so much time frustrated because I can’t easily find the answer in documentation, forums, Google searches, or YouTube?” Obviously, you can feel free to call me an idiot, and that’s a valid possibility, but in reality, I’m super tech savvy, am a connoisseur of UX and UI, have been through multiple notation programs as well as multiple DAW’s, and my reasoned personal opinion is that there are some things in Dorico that do feel unnecessarily complicated, and feel like the Dorico team took the long way around the solution for philosophical reasons, and sometimes the practical was dwarfed by the philosophical.
FWIW. I may entirely be in the minority, but something like this (“let’s capitalize vocal staves, but not other staves, then put the option to defeat our preference in a deep sub-sub-preference pane”) is symptomatic of that. A simpler solution would just be to have one consistent WYSYWIG approach (let the user type the stave name exactly as they wish it to appear), then if you want to offer advanced options in the prefs, do so.
It’s still an excellent, excellent program, and even though I consider myself only intermediate at it at this stage, it may be the best out there yet! I am THRILLED with the final output. I am not yet thrilled with how much time it takes me to get to get there, but that will improve with time.
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The Engraving Option to show vocal staff labels in capitals is only set like that in a few of the project templates, if you start a new project from scratch you should find vocal staves are the same as other instrument types.
Handling such matters of how notation is presented at a higher level (like note/beam grouping notation options etc) makes it easier to get a consistent end-result in the notated music, although it does require some decision making and knowledge of how to utilise the tools at your disposal.
For instance, what if halfway through a long section in 5/8 you decide you want to beam/group notes in 2+3 rather than 3+2? Instead of manually rebeaming every bar, you can replace the time signature with [2+3]/8 and everything up to the next time signature gets regrouped. Likewise, if you change your mind in a work for double-choir about whether the singers should have capitalized staff labels, updating all of them throughout the project is a one-option matter to change.
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You sum this up nicely, if inadvertently. You may be a world-class computer expert, but you are an intermediate at Dorico.
If you seek to understand the Dorico philosophy rather than expecting it to recreate itself in your own image, you will benefit the most. There is a logic to where different levels of control exist, and I admit that was one of the hardest things for me to internalize when I came from Finale several years ago. But I would not want Dorico to ape Finale’s “pragmatic” structure, which began by approaching notation via a visual rather than semantic route and has since just tacked many new, alternate ways to reach the same command. I appreciate Finale for what it is, but I find myself gravitating more and more to Dorico for how it does things; and I would not want Dorico’s semantic approach to change just to gain a click here or be too willing to conform to someone else’s (or worse, many someone elses’) idea of what is intuitive.
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This is so true. It took me a long time to make a mental map of where all my favorite settings are to be found, and in the meantime, it took me hours of searching high and low to find certain things. There’s no doubt that it IS frustrating when you can’t find the setting you need.
Once you understand the WHY of how the program is organized, it becomes much easier to intuit where something should be, and it gets a lot easier.
Countless people here have recounted how it has taken “coming to grips with Dorico’s working model” for things to become comfortable and fluid.
I think it’s safe to say that Dorico offers more options for customization than the other major music notation applications put together, and that certainly comes at a cost. There are at least some governing principles behind where different kinds of settings go, and we do our best to stick to those principles, but it’s obviously true that if those principles aren’t evident in the software itself or don’t feel sticky even once you’ve read about them or had somebody mention them to you, then the fact that such guiding principles exist doesn’t help much!
Obviously what things we choose to have set up by default is a huge part of this, too. I will freely admit that the option to have vocal staves labeled in upper case is a choice made by me, and it may well be European or even more or less British as a convention, but it’s one that I like. To some degree Dorico’s defaults do reflect my own tastes, though of course not exclusively so.
I don’t think there are easy answers to what default settings should be used or how users can learn the software. I will say that I think a couple of the user interface changes coming along in Dorico 4 may help (the collection of all options concerning the appearance of the music into a single menu, and another way to find categories of related settings that might appear in multiple places). There is always more we can do, and we will continue to think about this and try to bring continued improvement in future.
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@dspreadbury, chef’s prerogative! I don’t apologize for the music I schedule for our church (which undoubtedly reflect my tastes too) because, well, I’m the director. I chart our voyages, and that’s where the ship is headed, by golly! (Let’s see… can I cram another analogy in?)
You’ve been the conductor of this train, so, basque in the glory of tooting the horn! My ramblings are getting weird now, (lol) but suffice to say, you’ve certainly earned your stripes, general.
All aboard the Dorico Express!
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