Dorico 3.5 - Praises and Hopes

Dorico
1

The search features are exceptional! Speeds up my workflow by a lot! Empty notation sheets and graphic slices are 2nd best to me since I work almost exclusively for/with students. Thanks a lot!

You’ve done a lot lately for us teachers and work sheet creators. I really appreciate that! Still I have some thoughts and wishes that would improve some things I’m doing and others are probably doing too.

Pedal Lines - Retakes

  • Mark multiple notes and set Retakes in one go.
  • Repeat Retake Pattern: Select a region of a Pedal Line and make it possible to repeat its Retake-Pattern once, until the end of the Pedal Line or to extend the Pedal Line with that pattern. Make it possible to hide pedal lines and give us a Simile option. That would allow nice Playback without lots of Pedal Lines All Over the place. There might also be a better Pedal-Playback workflow I’m not aware of?
  • Allow the shortcut for Retake in note entering mode.

Fingerings
Many of my colleagues who are writing sheet music for their students like to make a version where the fingering is shown for every note and one with „useful“ fingerings. For the first approach it would speed up things a lot if we could select a range of notes, filter one or more and set the fingering to all of them in one go.

Filter Notes by Pitch
In addition to the last point it would be very useful to be able to save presets for the „filter notes by pitch“ dialogue and/or have a piano-keyboard view to quickly select and deselect notes. Flats and Sharps could be top and bottom half of the black keys, holding option, shift or cmd could trigger double flats/sharps where appropriate.

Jumping View on Playbacks
Often when the playhead switches to the next system the view stays the same though the next system is not completely visible on screen. Tried with Piano solo and Guitar ensembles.
Sometimes when Playback switches to the next page only 2 or 3 bars come into view and the view adjusts again when the playhead hits the border of the view.

Some teachers in my circle of colleagues started using notation software for students to play along in lessons on big TV-screens. Especially when working with large groups that turns out to work really nicely. One big problem is that all notation programs jump when the playhead reaches the border. Reading ahead is impossible! It would be really great to have an option for the view to jump a tick or half a bar before the playhead reaches the border. That would make playing along so much easier!

Engrave mode
Instant Print Preview: When holding the shortcut, scrolling on a Mac Trackpad won’t work but will make Dorico stay in Instant Print Preview after releasing the shortcut. Is this intended?

2

Thanks for your feedback. Regarding the instant print preview, I find that this works fine: I can hold down the key and zoom, pan and scroll with the trackpad with no problem. I think you are instead hitting the problem where, on a German keyboard, because you need to use two keys, the program gets confused about whether or not the shortcut has been released. We’ve already fixed that in our internal builds and a fix will appear in a future update. For the time being I suggest you try mapping it to a single key, if you can find one.

3

I can’t get Print Preview to work with the ` key, either, presumably because that key is set as a ‘dead’ key for use in typing diacritics. I can wait until a future update but the feature would be very handy for me. Unfortunately, I can’t find the command in Key Commands. I could only find Print Preview for first and last pages, as well as page up or down. Could someone point me in the right direction?

4

It’s called „Hide invisibles“.
If you have a different keyboard layout or use a different localization, the shortcut varies.

5

Ah, thank you, klafkid! The § key isn’t doing anything at the moment…

6

Being able to hide text on a per layout basis is great, but not a substitute for true “this layout only” text.

When editing parts most text is relevant to the current part only, and having to visit all other parts in order to hide it there is a bit tedious…
maybe this was conceived during lockdown, or maybe my brain got denser during same… :laughing:

7

If you only need the text on one part, then don’t use system text: just use staff text, and you’ll have to hide it only in the score. Or vice versa.

8

Thanks for waking me up :slight_smile: Indeed, the link is only between score layout and the part in question, not every part. Operator error, sorry.
Still it’s a nuisance having to wade through the score and hide…

9

Just wanted to add my vote to the “mark multiple notes and set retakes in one go” idea above. I do a fair bit of piano music, and it takes a lot of time to select and insert a retake for every note individually.

It would also be nice to have an option to copy the existing pedal markings when copying and pasting a selection of piano music.

Thanks.