Hi just throwing this into the mix as an idea for distant future Dorico development.
One thing I would love to see are specified zones that have an unlimited edit history, going back to the creation of the .dorico file.
Here is a scenario where it would be useful: lets say there are a few areas in a large arrangement/composition that you rework numerous times. At certain times you would like to go back and see the previous edits. These edits could be in the form of a snapshot, maybe not entirely dissimilar to the “Ideas” implementation in one of those other programs I forgot the name of.
To be able to have all the edit snapshots available (for instance in a popup) at any time and in a visual state where you could view all the edits stacked above one another, and then just select the particular edit you want as the “active” edit- would be great!
The primary way I do that now is to load/view previous versions of the file that I saved and specifically named eg “Piece 1_Bar 8 to 19 edit 3_less chromatic”, or something along those lines. It works but isn’t ideal.
Cubase essentially has this functionality in terms of midi information by having “lanes” within tracks and being able to make an active lane with the others muted.
Just an idea! I would be interested to hear any other thoughts on this from the forum if you think something like that would be useful for you or if you have developed a better workflow than mine to solve the issue.
One possible way you could use the features available to you today in this direction would be to use the Duplicate Flow feature when you’re about to make a big change, so you can effectively freeze the state of your project at that point, then keep going in your newly-created flow.
I too am using named files, but this is a kludgy solution. Using flows as a method to keep previous versions is also clumsy, and it is only practical if you have a single flow piece.
My 2 cents? Implement named versions like Sibelius - this is one of a very small set of features that I still miss. . . .
Thanks for the reply Daniel and others. yeah i’ll give the duplicate flow feature a go and I guess the idea is just to turn off the duplicated flows as you go, and always have them as a reference. Useful to keep all the changes in one active file, but definitely a long way from the zone idea i mentioned.
I do hope sometime (way down the line) that this kind of editing will be incorporated, as it would be a killer feature.
Dorico is great though, recommending it to all and sundry.
I seem to recall someone on this forum a long time ago mentioning versioning, specifically pointing out the irony that software development environments have robust versioning capabilities, but the software produced by the teams that benefit from those capabilities (indeed, their jobs would be impossible without it) doesn’t provide versioning remotely approaching what the teams use every day. If Dorico could provide the same kind of impressive versioning that software development teams use, it would be a killer feature, and these multiple flow/manual file-naming workarounds would be extinct, at least in the music field.
These are certainly the sort of things that are on our mind longer term. We know that there are some very important workflow features around the areas of versioning, merging, etc. Ironic as it is that we use version control in the development of the software, it’s true to say that managing the versioning of simple text files is an order of magnitude simpler than the diffs of musical content, page definitions, etc.