Hello, the following is an assorted collection of bigger and smaller issues I came across when using Dorico for multiple big orchestral scores. I kindly ask for your attention even though I apologize for such a big and messy list. Feel free to reply to individual points. A big thank you goes to the developers of this software as well as to the users here on the forum who have helped many a distressed soul, I hope this list is not seen as rude or unthankful, but as an attempt of contributing to a common goal.
Thanks and regards,
Roland
a1) please reliably put the selection in the center of the screen when switching views (page view/galley view, engrave mode/write mode, switching between layouts)! searching for the selection takes a lot of time as it happens very frequently
a2) aux notes in trills show wrong notes when condensed
a3) it doesnt seem to be possible to have a bar number at the beginning of a stave that starts with a multirest when bar numbers below multirests are enabled?
a4) the “counterpart layout” command, a very useful tool for quickly going from score to a part or vice versa, has three problems: 1. it doesnt work when a whole bar rest ist selected 2. the viewport doesnt correctly center on the selected object 3. when using the command in engrave mode, the selection is not preserved
a5) when selecting comments in the right hand action bar, the view doesnt always correctly jump to the selected comment, also the highlight colour when a comment is selected is not very well visible
a6) the command “beam together” doesnt work correctly if one of the selected notes is tied to a note larger than an eighth note
a7) please dont select multiple items with one click - i lose so much time because of having to redo selections: note plus slur, gliss, cresc, adjacent noteheads etc… are often selected when clicking on the notehead and result in popover actions affecting the wrong area without me noticing at first to name just one thing. also, in engrave mode, the notehead is always the last thing that will be selected when clicking on a notehead from a distance… first it will select stem, dynamic, whatever
I must say I dont understand why it is even possible to select multiple items with one click, what is the benefit?
What would relieve me is if the behaviour of the shift-alt-click shortcut (as in selecting only one item at a time) would be the default behaviour, at least as a toggleable option…
a8) when selecting the last bar in a flow and typing “>p” into the dynamics popover, the dim. hairpin and piano mark will be put correctly into the selected bar, however, an empty bar will be created after the selected bar and the piano will be anchored to the first beat of the new bar even though it is displayed at the end of the selected bar; maybe this could be changed so that the new dynamic is anchored to the last beat of the selection and no empty bar has to be created
a9) take a melody containing a triplet doubled at the octave (but in one voice), select the lower notes and make them a downstem-voice → the triplet will be broken
a10) the arrow keys shortcuts to navigate up and down between the notes dont work correctly when a chord contains a unison or an altered (splitstem) unison; one note will be left out in each direction
a11) the “zoom-to-selection” feature doesnt work 100%, this is most evident in a large orchestral score when selecting a note and zooming in and out a great deal; the view wont be completely centered on the selected note, and when zooming out really far and then in again, the note sometimes wont be in view at all
a12) inconsistency with tremolo stroke count, dotted rhythms and tied notes:
with dotted rhythms such as in the following four notes: “dotted 8th - 16th - dotted 8th - 16th”, selecting all four notes and adding for example a three-stroke tremolo, each of the four notes gets a three-stroke tremolo. however, when the second note is tied to the third note and doing the same, all notes will get a three-stroke tremolo except for the third note which will get a four-stroke tremolo
a13) a collision I wanted to mention concerning glissandi and flags: create two eighth notes (not beamed together), the first one being a g inside the treble clef staff, the second one being the same note or a higher note, and create a glissando between them. there will be collisions between the gliss.line and the flag of the first eighth note, and more severely, at some intervals the “gliss.” text will appear when there isnt enough room and will collide with the flag.
a14) an inconsistency with popover functionality: when I select for example a ff dynamic and press enter, the dynamics popover will open filled with the selected text “ff”, and when I change that to “p”, the fortissimo will be replaced by a piano. this also works with the tempo popover or with the metre popover, however, it doesnt work with the playing techniques popover (for example replacing a “string 1” marking by a “string 2” marking), here, an additional marking will be created. I wonder, wouldnt it be more consistent if selecting a marking and pressing enter would always allow the user to modify that marking (as implied also by the text in the opened popover being selected) whereas selecting a note or a rhythmic position and pressing a popover shortcut would always create new markings.
Right now, the inconsistency isnt even only between different popovers: returning to the example at the beginning, when I select a “ff”, press enter and replace it by a “cresc” (or e.g. by a “fp”), the marking wont get replaced but a crescendo will be added after the fortissimo (- if I wanted that, wouldnt it be more logical to just add the “cresc” after the “ff” inside the popover?) I press enter again and the opened popover now says “ffcresc.”; I try deleting the “cresc.”-part and hit enter but that doesnt remove the crescendo - wouldnt it be logical to also be able to make that modification (of deleting items) through this functionality?
a15) in a large orchestral project with a handful of flows, I ran into problems copying and pasting large sections of music; in the areas around the pasted material I would end up with some instruments music not being moved correctly with the music in the other instruments, or with one voice of an instrument being moved but not the others… Im sorry for not being able to point to the exact root… but in essence I couldnt trust the software with keeping the music around the pasted regions intact, which is a shame and cost a lot of time
a16) pause playback using space, change the playback tempo (in the upper right corner), press space to resume playback: the playhead will not resume where it left of and use the new tempo, but it will jump to the location where it would be if the new playback tempo would have been valid since the beginning of the piece
a17) the harmonic symbol (circle) is not placed above the correct note horizontally in chords with seconds or unisons
a18) in the music symbols editor when selecting a glyph range, the previews of all the glyphs are all not centered and scaled correctly to fit the preview tiles.
a19) why are breath marks created after the selected note whereas caesuras are created before the selected note? (which I personally find more logical, but the most important thing is that it is consistent imo)
a20) a caesura in a bar prohibits fermatas after that caesura from showing in all instruments: take a bar of 4/4 in a score with multiple instruments, add 4 quarter notes in one instrument, create a caesura before the second beat, create a fermata on the third beat: it wont show in the other instruments but will appear once the caesura is deleted
a21) using e.g. [1+1+1+1]/4 to get a bar of 4/4 where each beat is beamed separately seems to get overridden by the notation option to “break beams at beam boundaries” (also true for bars without a half bar like [1+1+1+1+1]/4) is this a bug? other configurations such as [1+1+2]/4 dont get overridden
is there not a way to create beam groups outside of this popover-shortcut? say I want a time signature of 2/2 but with beam breaks at every quarter, how could I even enter it into the popover?
a22) a series of tuplet notes (e.g. triplets) - select and delete last note of last tuplet → selection jumps to last note of previous tuplet instead of previous note in current tuplet
when deleting the first note of a triplet, the selection will jump to the triplet bracket, cant it jump to the note before? that would be much more consistent with how it works outside of tuplet… furthermore, when that happens it is not possible to use the tab key to get back to the music as the tab shortcut does not jump to/from rests - please consider changing this generally, as this often causes the need to get off the keyboard and use the mouse just to select a note again, which is disruptive and doesnt fit together with the smooth workflow elsewhere in the program!
a23) is there a reason that that force duration command when trying to change e.g. two tied quarters to a half note, pressing “o, 7” doesnt work, only something like “o, 6, 7”, so I first have to change to a smaller value? isnt the purpose of force duration that I really just can force it to be whichever note value immediately? just a nagging disruption of the workflow
a24) when changing an existing tempo or dynamic in the popover (e.g. q=120 to q=124 or p to pp), please keep all of the properties (scaling, custom position (offset), parenthesized, alignment, beat-relative position; these are all lost unfortunately!)
a25) when selecting an area of music across several instruments ending at say a quarter note, but one of the middle instruments has 8ths or another smaller value at the end, only the first note of that beat will be selected instead of the whole selected beat… I kindly urge to make it so that the full beat is selected in all selected staves, regardless of how that beat is structured, because it is very not practical when making a selection of large swaths of staves to look for that one staff that has the smallest subdivision at the end of the beat one wants to select. (I know that one can also select time in the system track, but one often wants to select just some and not all of the instruments)
a26) its not possible to right-click on a group of players in setup mode, is this intentional? this seems to make it impossible to batch-remove players from a group or to batch-duplicate players or to batch-control chord symbols visibility options…
a27) is there a way for the program to automatically take into account the vertical space that multiple lines of lyrics take? for example when the bottom staff on a page has multiple lines of lyrics, they may cross the page margins without the program compensating…
a28) the cues engraving option to “show ‘Play’ at next entry” doesnt actually put the “Play”-text at the next entry of the instrument as the description says and as is common practice, but places it after the cue has ended, which might not be the same thing at all when there are some more rests between the end of a cue and the actual entry of the instrument
a29) take two trombones that start on different notes, then both glissando into the same note at the start of the next bar: the glissandi will not show properly in condensed mode when there is a line break before that next bar
the problem also exists with divisi staves going to non divisi staves
a30) when selecting the latter of two grouped playing techniques (connected by an arrow) and moving it on the rhythmic grid using the ctrl-alt-left/right shortcut: this works, but: when multiple instruments have the same thing and one ctrl-selects all of the latter playing techniques, moving this selection will break the grouping of the playing techniques
a31) when a tied note has an articulation, splitting that tied note somewhere using the U-shortcut will also put that articulation on the newly created note, when actually, it should put the articulation on only one of the two notes that result from the split, depending on whether it is an articulation that gets put on the last note of a tie chain (staccato) or on the first note of a tie chain (accent)
a32) there is a problem with misplaced tuplet numbers when the downstem-voice in a condensed staff goes above the upstem-voice and is tied and the upstem-voice has triplets; the triplet numbers will get placed above the tie (see attached image)
a33) when stemlets over rests are enabled, sometimes the stemlet is not drawn correctly, and I think it has to do with multiple voices and tieing a note to the downstem-note then repeating that section… see attached image
