Dear Dorico,
Please enter the 21rst century and get your MIDI export fundamentals together.
Exporting MIDI from Dorico does not retain user given names for players/instruments/tracks!
Renaming the player slot, then again in the instrument slot (full and short name for some god awful reason) they don’t even retain their names. This naming system in Dorico is terrible and is compounded when trying to make sense of MIDI exports. How many clicks does it take to rename something? It shouldn’t be a deep dive.
This is an impediment to MIDI file export in that it adds a superfluous step to the process, and yet it doesn’t work! Then you wind up with irrelevant instrument/track names in every place that you open the Dorico created MIDI file.
As a useful utility for creating MIDI files from Dorico, I should be able to name any staff easily without the association of an instrument. Being able to create a staff without an instrument would be helpful, and renaming that staff by double clicking the name in “Write” mode - to a name that will be retained properly upon MIDI export is a very logical solution. And those names should identify their tracks properly in MIDI files.
There is also the matter of the lack of MIDI export options:
Dorico needs to add a check box list to be able to select which player/instrument/tracks are being exported.
The only other way to export parts or groups separately is to delete them from the setup, which makes for a very cumbersome process. Ask any audio engineer if that would be their preferred process for exporting stems and you would get a double facepalm.
Other options are important as well, such as a check box to bypass all playback humanization from export. It is not time efficient to go off in the weeds to adjust timing and velocity playback preferences before every MIDI export. Again, lots of diving through menus for things that should be one click away.
There is also an error in multi-channel MIDI export:
Channel 10 is not present. When exporting, anything assigned to channel 10 or beyond in Dorico playback will get shifted up by one channel. So, channel 10 inside Dorico is exported as channel 11, channel 11 as 12… and so on. C’mon.
Now, more naming-
What’s with the Flows here? Please do not implement things as a “convenience” when there are acting as obstructions on other uses, especially those of which are commonplace (such as exporting MIDI!). Flows are fine for certain uses, but let us turn some features off when not needed.
Let us name the files please- directly from the export window like any other commercial application on this EARTH does because it’s common courtesy at this point. It is a basic expectation as normal software behaviour. Now that is beyond MIDI, beyond music apps and out to the whole environment of commercial software. Dorico, sometimes you make me feel like I bought a car with 4 moon-roofs, 15 climate control zones, yet without windshield wipers or headlights. And it takes a combination of 9 moves to turn the radio on or off.
Sorry fo the rant, but some of these issues are glaring and simply unprofessional. I would love to get to ideas on feature requests someday, but we can’t have bells and whistles until the fundamental infrastructure is there.
We need better tools for making MIDI files. I suggest Dorico get its act together on this matter. MIDI files and MIDI music creation are certainly not going away!