In that I’m entering notes, and I want to make a change to one so I then have to set “Select” to be on so I can select the note (with the mouse), make the change, then go and turn it off again. I find that’s pretty much 20% of the time spent in Dorico is doing that. The other 80% of the time is Ctrl-Z because Dorico did something unexpected.
Does this help at all?
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It does help, yes. Thanks.
I don’t know if by keyboard you’re referring to MIDI, or Qwerty.
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QWERTY (It took me longer to type those letters than I care to admit)
I too rarely use a MIDI keyboard. And I’m probably more addicted to mouse than some others here. However, std keyboard note entry is very quick and efficiently organised.
My advice is to use the mouse as little as possible - there is usually a quicker way!
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That it would place the note.
Aha, OK. Provided mouse input is enabled, then that’s exactly what will happen, but of course if you’ve disabled mouse input via the Select tool (per later posts in the thread), then clicking will only select and not input.
Regarding being able to drag notes up and down with the mouse, it’s always been the case that lots of users would like this to be possible, and we’ve been a bit stubborn about it, because it makes it that much more likely to make unintentional edits. However, our stance on this has softened a bit since we integrated the Key Editor into Write mode, where such edits are directly possible, and so you can expect it to be possible (perhaps not by default, but by enabling an option) to drag notes up and down in a future version.
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I’m pleased you’re being less stubborn about things that users would find useful. For users prone to unintentional edits, the ability to turn the feature off would seem to be the way forward and to stop those who make mistakes being the reason a feature can’t be implemented for everyone else. I would be awfully disappointed if I couldn’t have a car simply because some other people crashed theirs.
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Not to derail your comparison, but I am quite sure you can’t have a modern car without, say, an airbag system, pretty much for that reason.
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The airbag doesn’t stop the crash. We have Ctrl-Z/Command-Z.
No one can have steak because someone people might choke. We can work through different analogies if you wish.
You can’t move notes with a mouse because some people might make errors.
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No one is denying you from changing the notes: you just don’t like the method provided.
Analogies are like an old coat. They don’t always fit.
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Let’s keep things nice and civil, as this forum is renowned for being. I for one take pride in the sympathy and understanding we extend to users expressing frustrations, because we’ve all been there at some point, whether within Dorico or another software.
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I didn’t see anyone being uncivil. No one was uncivil to me.
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Fair enough, I was just wary of where the conversation could go.
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I understand you perfectly. After 20 years with Sibelius, I was just as frustrated at the beginning. After reading in the forum here again and again that you need a few weeks to get used to the concept, I tried it anyway.
I can only advise you to forget the mouse and type as much as possible with the QWERTY keyboard. Especially the key combinations Shift and/or Alt plus arrow keys (lengthen/shorten notes and raise and lower them by semitones) saved me through this time. Once you have internalised the key combinations, Dorico is really easy to use and the note input seems very robust compared to other programmes.
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Doesn’t pressing ESCAPE turn off the input caret (which would presumably default to the selection cursor). That’s what I generally use.
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The first time I tried Dorico, after using Sibelius and Finale for decades, it took me about a half hour trying to enter a half rest before I discovered that you don’t actually need to enter rests - you just place the cursor where you want the note to be, and Dorico fills in the rest for you.
So it definitely works differently than other notation programs. But now that I’ve gotten used to it, I can compose so much more efficiently - it’s the closest I’ve felt to writing music by hand. As my friend Carla Scaletti says, intuitive often means “something you learned a long time ago.”
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Yes, the premise that software should be “intuitive” is always a bit suspect, I think – we’re not actually born with intuition about which key produces what action, it’s a matter of expectation based on past experience. So it’s apt to be especially inapplicable dealing with so complex a matter as music notation, for which a new interface is likely to demand that we let go of what we’re used to so that we can learn a new way.
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Our favorite %$*&# subject on this forum!
@matt.whitby, please do a search for “intuitive” and you can spend the rest of the day reading past discussions. It’s all been said many times before. There are reasons.
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I guess? It wouldn’t toggle back on though, which is what was requested. Inputting using a mouse is like making a joke about analogy.- I’ve never tried doing it.
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With three decades of software development behind me I have enough of a grasp on intuitive interfaces, but thanks for the idea.
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