“Why doesn’t Dorico make my work flow easier than other people’s” is a common complaint - and the answer is because as soon as you lock it into one pattern of work you make it harder for everyone that follows another work flow. I don’t use triplets much but I use tuplets a lot - it would be hugely irritating. Also shift+t is the tempo popover
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I usually ALT-click them in, this is pretty fast!
B.
Arguably, Dorico is at least conceptionally locked into a laptop-only, no touchscreen workflow…
If Dorico achieves anything, standardizing needlessly ‘quirky’ notation would be its greatest achievement. Not all old editions are venerable authorities – and that goes for some composers, too. 
Copying them verbatim without adjudication is a very slow way to photocopy!
Dorico has certainly been built from the perspective of “common ground first, alternatives to follow”; and it’s great that there are now many options and functions for alternative styles and variations. Nothing should be impossible, even if it takes a bit of time and effort to do something unusual.
From a layout perspective, perhaps; but from a musical or notational perspective, Dorico’s ability to treat different items as having different properties and capabilities is exactly what makes it uniquely productive, IMO.
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That much is probably true - the key layout does seem to recognise that very few people have an extra numpad on their keyboard for example
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I would like to be able to select a CC value to display on the Write view staff as thin colored lines over the notes on the staff. Either similar to the placement for drawing System Track but for each staff instrument, or even directly on top of the staff itself (not as a line object which has to avoid collision, but like drawing a line on a graphic layer on top of the notes). This drawn line should not be editable but for display only, as a visual reference.
Automation lines if drawn on a staff are similar to seeing phrase marks over melodic lines in how CC lines can show timbral arcs or motifs.
Similarly it would be interesting to be able to show the Tempo Map as a drawn line, in addition to or in lieu of, showing “rit…a tempo” etc.
Yes it is possible to split the window horizontally in Play view and use various sidebars/panels to sort-of do this, but showing overlay lines directly on the staff would be very illustrative when writing/editing production music for where ‘expressionistic movement’ is happening in Write view.
Imagine writing a Pop/EDM track in staff notation and being able to visualize the Low Pass Filter automation on the Pad instrument, directly along with the staff.
I am writing score for Orchestral Brass Ensemble (edit: for the curious; it is Quartet/Quintet, i.e. small ensemble) and notice there is no built-in Playing Technique for the somewhat common extended technique of “Blow Air” or “Breath” (i.e. unpitched; no lip pursing; creates air sound through instrument). I think there could be builtin Technique name(s) added for that. There is a Technique for ‘Whisper’ but it isn’t the same; I might use ‘Mouth Open’ or not, and have to add a custom one. Here is extensive detailed engraving and audio examples of the technique : Air Sounds - The Modern Trumpet by Nathan PlanteThe Modern Trumpet by Nathan Plante . Nice quote: “As I mentioned, most contemporary trumpet players will have a whole repertoire of air noises, so if you are writing for a specific player, don’t hesitate to ask them to show you what they can do.”
In general I do not like to create ‘New’ techniques (i.e. custom Technique names) for an instrument, especially one I don’t play, because I want to follow established engraving convention, or the instrumentalist’s standard/idiomatic vocabulary, or as close to modern convention as possible; so if there is a suitable default, then I choose that, rather than inventing my own unique name (which no one else may immediately understand the intention of).
Edit (there are a couple nice replies offering examples below now): These extended brass/wind techniques (and other mouth instruments) also have the added dimension that there could be a phoneme associated with them, such as the distinction between “Breath ‘Tuh’” vs “Breath ‘Puh’” vs. “Breath ‘Waa’”, etc. Those could be considered to be notated as Property Suffix to a singular Playing Technique, or independent elements, I’m not sure.
ALSO: It would be nice to be able to specify Playing Techniques to have a border around the text (like System Text can do). If not engraving using Playing Techniques then I just add System Text with a border-box to indicate what to play. ALSO: Of course it would be nice if Playing Techniques also could automatically modify the notehead type, for example making these extended techniques into square noteheads, etc. Personally I choose “X Noteheads” by setting that manually, which is more time consuming as a manual step.
Hey - I can see you problem - however I’ve written pieces with breath noises and as far as I know there’s no standard notation for breath noises - I tend to use square noteheads for that sort of thing with a description in the front matter if it helps. It’ll be interesting to see if the team respond but my guess is it’s too niche to incorporate it the way you’d like. Not many VSTs support that sort of play back either.
Side note - out of experience, writing breath noise for a larger group of instruments can be problematic…
I used this style of notation at the beginning of this COVID-era virtual recording a couple of years ago, and it was self-explanatory for musicians all over the world.
(My beaming settings have improved since then, LOL)
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My thoughts exactly. I’ve seen more than a few modern compositions for concert band that have such auxiliary sounds. In practice, things like this (especially breath/wind) are not nearly loud enough to have any impact on an audience. Probably works better with a quartet performing in a small room, or ensembles that have microphones on each instrument.
The Amadeus beaming ba-command. Based on absolute duration instead fractions. Can be used to make any (and even incorrect…) beamings, e.g. ba2; ba4,4,2; ba4.; ba0 etc. Hopefully an easy(?!) task to implement, just like other pup-ups in Dorico. Would remove the need for in time signatures btw.
… and/or the stem annotation, which can also be customized.
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And Audio input would be nice. For transcribing stuff for example.
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This is (IIRC) on the Development Team’s To-Do List. No announced arrival date yet, which is the usual procedure with additions to the program.
And welcome to the forum, @Laurenz_Timmerer .
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One feature I remember - but don’t necessarily want - from Sibelius 6 - was a large library of plugins, which were normally somewhere between excellent and fairly-janky work-arounds for automating tasks.
One really good one was the placement of automatic cues in the score, based on the number of bars that an instrument was silent for.
It wasn’t fully automatic, in that one then had to go and check them to make sure that they were all as you would want, but it sped up the cues thing and made it more difficult to miss a good spot for a cue because the score was so huge.
That would be a nice touch in Dorico. I fully accept that there are more important things though,
That’s already possible, natively: Cue suggestions
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I think also that Dorico has made the deliberate choice to lock down workflows into a specific pattern of work in order to gain the efficiencies that it brings. I think this can be seen by the setup/write/edit/engrave cycle that it encourages. Yes, you can put in a dynamic, then edit its placement, then move on to the next dynamic and so on but it would be a massive PITA to do in Dorico. What you gain by going with the workflow Dorico is designed to encourage is a fractional time saving in each little thing which adds up to a large time save.
The biggest step I made in learning Dorico was stopping trying to force it to behave like Sibelius.
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Wait, what? Dorico can implement suggestions backwards in time??
Amazing - thanks for the info!
Indeed. Whereas “power users” in Finale found it almost a 100% necessity to use third-party plug-ins (or even vendor-supplied plug-ins) that were unreliable, quirky, and poorly supported, I have rarely found myself wishing for additional plug-in capability with Dorico. Most things I would have looked to plug-ins for when using Finale, have better solutions built directly into Dorico.
That does mean there is more to learn about the inherent capabilities of Dorico, but overall, it is a solution I find to be 100X more elegant and at least 5X more productive than with the products conceived in the 1980s and 1990s.
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If Dorico could import ABC music notation directly, it might be useful.
ABC notation is an unambiguous and detailed method to share music using text. The A.I. chatbots can’t write staff or midi or musicxml (and even if they did, that would be cumbersome), but they seem to be able to write answers in ABC notation:
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