Thank you. I will try.
Witold
As promised I did a few experiments concerning mixer showing nothing and that is what I found: I open a ver.3.5 project and mixer shows active channels (putting aside the routing problem), I save it as ver.4.0, reopen and mixer stops showing anything. The only fader that works is the one supposed to be output, but it shows no activity. Individual channels show noting and their faders do nothing. I may make a short video if it was helpful for the developers.
Witold
Yes, by all means do make a short video to show us whatâs happening on your system.
I have it ready. How do I send it to you?
Witold
Files were sent and you should have them by now. One is called âProject ver 3.5 played on D4â, the other âProject after saving as ver D4â. When watching the first notice, please, that while the full mixer shows activities in channels, the mixer in lower zone does completely nothing. The second file shows the same file after saving in D4 version and there none of mixer does anything. Interesting, however, is that in both cases the fader in horn channel shows the activity.
Hope it helps.
Witold
Someone may have reported this already, but there is a bug in the otherwise beautiful new mixer: the instruments are not displayed in the order of the score.
See screenshot of film score template. For some reason, flute 3, bass clarrinet, bass trombone and contrabassoon are all the way to the right of the mixer.
Thanks
Peter
Realistically I expect it will not be until after we have completed the work on rebuilding the currently missing editors that were present in Dorico 3.5, because as we are continuing to work on the Key Editor in particular we are finding it necessary to make changes to the interaction model, and we donât want to waste everybodyâs time writing documentation that is very quickly outdated.
In the meantime, documentation of things like expression maps, percussion maps, playback templates etc. are all complete and available in the Dorico 3.5 Operation Manual, and documentation for the Key Editor and the new Play mode can be found in the Dorico 4 Version History PDF.
Daniel,
Any help, correction or explanation here will be very seriously most appreciated.
Still about Play Mode and Mixer. I have been writing music on D4 for last several weeks and finally decided to go back to 3.5. Why?
- in both versions at the moment Mixer is unusable the same way, i.e. MIDI channels function, every other channel in one way or another does not. I know, the D4 Mixer is being given another big overhaul, but until it is improved it is of no big use,
- D4âs Play mode only on the surface seems better but after longer use I have discovered that many useful functions from Play 3.5 disappeared or are so difficult to find that I did not succeed finding them. These useful functions that seem to disappear are:
- associated lanes: dynamics seem to disappear,
- possibility to open more than one lane at the same time. In 3.5 for each track I could open dynamics, velocity, articulations and CC, all at once. In D4 it looks like I can have only one lane open at the time (if I am wrong I will be very happy to learn how to open more)
- in 3.5 I could open these lanes for every active track at the same time, which, once working correctly, was giving me a lot of information about how the instruments behave. I could see much bigger picture of the score than in D4, where I have to activate the lower zone where I see only one track with one lane at the time. If I am wrong I will be happy to be corrected.
- in 3.5 Play mode I can scroll and zoom as I please, using shortcuts or scroll bars, in D4 those disappeared,
- in 3.5 scrolling through Mixer is easy with scroll bar and possibility to change the with of channels. In D4 those disappeared,
- the instrument assignment tables in both D3.5 and D4 are the same, i.e. if you do not assign instruments linearly to channels and/or ports but choose them to use particular instruments from your library you have tons of unused ports and channels displayed making the info a bit clattered.
Of course, Write, Setup and Engrave are greatly improved, but the link to Cubase, Play mode with its Mixer seem to suffer bugs difficult to correct.
Again, any workable correction, hint or help will be very well seen.
Witold
Iâm working on a project which requires support for EWQL Wordbuilder 2 which only exists in Dorico 4. Otherwise â despite some wonderful new features like the jump bar-- itâs quite likely at the moment that for someone like you or myself who spends much of the editing time on playback refinement, 3.5 might for the moment still be a better option although of course, Daniel might not accept every point Iâm about to make . There are also some things I like a good deal already in the new Key Editor as jumping into focus when the link button is activated. Couple of points:
- I assume the when the dynamic lane returns the first issue should be history. As things are, I even sometimes get strange âghost linesâ where a horizontal dynamics line seems to come out of nowhere when you draw in a new line in one of the CC editors
- open more than one lane at a time. In the sense that you can open a lane in several different tracks, this is sadly missed and I donât think we yet have an indication that this will return. What Iâd particularly like is that when the dynamics lane returns that it will be possible to edit a group of selected dynamics simultaneously just by dragging up or down on the handles of one of them. Even if you canât actually see more than one lane at once, you should be able to edit more than one at once (obviously by the same amount), otherwise itâs a few precious seconds wasted each time.
On the other hand, being able to show several CC lanes for the same part is planned and should be at least as good as before, probably better.
- scroll and zoom as I please. I believe this will be refined further in due course. Naturally the actual data can be zoomed as required and scrolling backward and forwards through the events can be achieved using for instance SHIFT+ mouse wheel (or some equivalent on a laptop)
- instrument assignment tables yes, I agree here but am used to it and I donât think this is likely to change in the near future.
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About these âghost linesâ, I found them several times when trying to correct CC1 curves. As you said, out of nowhere sharp jumps to other values but fortunately under the curves that are being actually executed. The Play mode and Mixer seem to be a strange case of âimproving by worseningâ. It was enough to improve what was not working well (there were a few things well conceived but badly executed) in 3.5 Play mode, make the Mixer work as planned and we would be happy. Now we have new Play, nice for eyes, but poorer and limping again and Mixer, very new and very not working. Why? I think perhaps the developers were not listening to users attentively enough. I am sure that there were many of us signalling these problems.
On another note, a need for help. Imagine in the middle of the bar you have two eights followed by a half note
and want to turn eights to a triplet. You use â;â shortcut and get â3:2â and after a click you get a triplet with the third note âstollenâ from the next, i.e. a triplet of eights and a dotted quarter followed by eightâs pause
, while I should get
Any idea how to avoid this uncomfortable situation and get a triplet of eights and untouched half note? I looked in manual and found nothing of an explanation.
Witold
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Youâre not alone in thinking that the changes to the Play mode/ Key Editor are a retrograde step. Itâs tempting to speculate, as some have, as to whether this redesign would have taken place without the iPad version and likely a desire to make both easily interchangeable, as opposed to working more in the direction of establishing an ever closer link to Cubase. Iâll sit on the fence in the meantime as I think itâs only fair to wait until the new mode is complete. To say that the developers were not sufficiently listening to users is a bit strong at this stage, I think.
As for the âconvert existing notes to tupletsâ, this feature is designed to convert the selected notes into triplets in your case. The resulting number notes is the same as the number you selected. You canât select only two as you have done. I entirely see your logic but thatâs not how Dorico is actually programmed. Check out this quick introductory video if you didnât already How to Turn any Notes into Tuplets in Dorico | Getting Started with Dorico 2 - YouTube
And Daniel just beat me into suggesting a workaround!
Thereâs no way to achieve the result youâre asking for in one step: Dorico will always fill up the tuplet you create. But you can easily select the following note and type Alt+right to move it out of the tuplet.
For me, play mode is a step back compared to 3.5 and I wonder why it was released like this.
For the time being it keeps me from using it for playback.
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David,
Thanks for a hint, but what Anthony Hughes shows in the video was never my problem. I have been writing in Dorico for quite a while and adding tuplets as I write is easy. The problem I described above arises when I decide to insert a triplet into an existing line of notes (like in the examples I attached). I moved to Dorico after decades with Sibelius and some of my habits (and expectations) come from this fact. In Sibelius this operation is trivial. You choose those two eighth notes, click ctrl/cmd 3 and you have a triplet ready with next note untouched. So it is doable and I was surprised that what Sibelius could do Dorico was not able to do as well or even better. Unfortunately for those of us switching from Sibelius to Dorico the comparing will never cease and expectations for Dorico to best Sibelius in every regard will not cease either.
Despite of the hiccups and troubles I still find Dorico better option for Cubasers than Sibelius and I believe that one day (hopefully soon) we will have nothing to write about on this forum, except, perhaps for praises.
Witold
I take your points â for many of us who have moved from Sibelius, there are a handful of things we liked there which are currently done less well or not at all in Dorico (I never much liked triplet handling in Sibelius personally to be honest). Thatâs inevitable. The main thing is the overall picture and to me since v.3 itâs not been even close.
Why did you not like tripletâs handling by Sibelius? It would be interesting to learn something.
Witold
@dspreadbury, nothing ad hominem intended below, as i appreciate your presence, helpful remarks, and attention to detail, as ever.
i am writing to criticize the idea of creating expectations of improvement and collecting money for same without an upgrade being adequately completed, tested, and documented.
vital functions such as the play window, which is where the central innovation of the program lies, have been degraded and are released undocumented (the pdf is not much help, either). the marriage of sequencing and notation is the holy grail for most of us. we want easy setup, we want to play our virtual instruments and see usable, easily editable notation appear, and we care about the sound of our simulations.
i and surely many others have taken time out from writing in order to to improve my workflow by going through the upgrade process. i expected previously promised items such as improved drumset handling, but there is no drum editor. i cannot even load my vst instruments; everything sounds as one instrument, when there should be eight. i see no easily found, prominent place to set a midi channel for a virtual instrument. things do not scroll properly. vst documentation refers to dorico 1.2. this is just not finished, why is it being released? i am going back to 3.5, having wasted over a week all told, beginning with asknetâs awful upgrade implementation . the core idea of this post is this: it would be better for the reputation of your program, your team, and your company if such a major upgrade were not rushed to market in such an unfinished state.
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Most of the things you mention work just fine, but differently then 3.5. Maybe you should learn whatâs different and how it works before complainingâŚ