I marked Daniel’s post as the solution because of this statement “perhaps we should always explicitly round these values to, say, three decimal places.”
1 Like
Or instead of three decimal places, round to three or five or whatever significant digits.
Perhaps the Development Team should just keep on following the roadmap to handle significant features and leave the virtually insignificant cosmetic stuff for later (if ever).
The Development Team’s time is not unlimited, and Dorico is known for its significant breakthroughs.
You are making a value judgment about what is significant. An aspect that causes confusion and looks like an error to people is significant enough. Speaking as a software developer myself, adjusting the number of displayed decimals or providing a user preference for it would maybe take an afternoon. Its not a big deal in terms of technical complexity. The other time honoured way to deal with this is not change anything but document it in the manual, since it is mostly a problem of understanding, as we now know.
[Mind you, I am familiar with the problem that a big company like Microsoft can take a year to change and test a few lines of code, with 170 or so languages to test and a multitude of other complexifying factors to account for! There’s a good essay from Microsoft on this somewhere.]
I think we both are, along with a number of others on this thread. There is nothing wrong with that.
And you are not the only one who has written software, so please…
I am returning to this topic to suggest a small change which would help eliminate the confusion that occurs when the actual tempo Dorico displays in the properties panel doesn’t equal the desired tempo. When calculating the MIDI tempo value by dividing 60,000,000 by the desired tempo expressed in quarter notes per minute, perhaps Dorico should round the quotient to the nearest integer rather than truncating toward zero.
If the desired tempo is 66 quarter notes per minute, this change would produce a MIDI tempo value of 909091 microseconds per quarter note, and the actual tempo would be 60,000,000 divided by 909091 which is approximately 65.9999934 quarter notes per minute, which Dorico would round to 66.0000 quarter notes per minute.
As I believe some have already stated, there are film composers among us who on occasion need to set fractional MM markings. It isn’t that difficult to ignore the .0001 one doesn’t wish to see.
I’d rather see it and know what is happening than not see it and wonder what is happening. (There is enough of that sort of thing going around these days.)
My suggested change would cause the actual tempo to be as close as possible to the desired tempo so that when the actual tempo is rounded to four decimal places, it would be more likely to appear to be the same as the desired tempo.
3 Likes
I’ll talk to my colleague Paul about this at some point (he’s away this week), and see what he thinks.
Thank you Daniel. The level of support you provide is second to none.
I understand the rounding issue and the reason for it. Tonight in D4 I found a display problem.
- When I write 52 in a tempo mark, Dorico will let me have it: 52.0000
- But when I adjust a tempo to 52 in Properties, the field changes 52 to 51.9998 – which is not a problem in itself, but …
- During playback the Fixed Tempo Mode display truncates that to 51 instead rounding it to 52! Not cool. This is a change from Dorico 3.5.
After several minutes of pounding on various test projects, I figured out that I can get back to exactly 52 by explicitly writing it in the popover, and then hide or re-hide the metronome mark if desired.
Please make the tempo display round the current BPM again rather than truncating it.
1 Like
Sorry, we’ve not looked at this since John made his suggestion last summer (Paul’s barely worked a day on Dorico itself since then, since he’s been so heavily involved in the Steinberg Licensing project), but I’ll try to bump it up the priority list.
2 Likes
Hi Folks,
I’d just like to weigh in on add another aspect of this.
Here’s my issue: I’d like to be able to display the tempo 154.6875. Yes, I know it’s close to 155, but I’d like to show the relationship from the previous tempo. It modulates from an 11-tuplet in 225 bpm.
I appreciate that Dorico let’s me show decimals (or not), but this rounding issue means that it will display the wrong tempo. It displays “154.6878”, and if I move it lower it says “154.6874”
I don’t care about the precision of the playback, I just want to display the correct number. I can display text instead but not with a quarter note.
We have all realized that these rounding issues are a result of what’s happening “under the hood.” But it would be great if we could display the entered number even if the actual number is slightly different in the code. This is notation software after all, shouldn’t the important thing here be displaying it the way we want?
That said, I appreciate the folks at Dorico, I think the software is great. The main issues I run into just have to do with displaying things. In many cases, it seems to me if there were just an over-ride function, it would be great. I know this is another topic, but I want to display a blank tablature staff to put my own markings on, but I can only make a tablature staff by defining the strings traditionally and letting it create automatically.
A note about tempo specificity:
There are many of us (I am certainly not alone on this) who do want to display precise decimal places on the tempos of our scores. One reason is slow tempi. The difference between 120.0 and 120.5 may be slight, but 40 to 40.5 to 41 is noticeable.
Another reason is tempo/metric modulations. This is the one that applies in my work.
If we start at quarter = 100, the speed of the dotted-8th is 133.333… I am not arguing that starting a piece at 133 or at 133.333 would be much different. On the other hand, we wouldn’t tune to 439.5 Hz or 440.5 when everyone else in the ensemble tunes to 440Hz.
An accurate goal is a good thing, it doesn’t require perfection from performers, it just shows where to aim.
If you have Dorico 4, you can display text with a quarter note by using the “Insert Music Text” feature. Otherwise, you can use a font like MusGlyphs.
1 Like
Thanks! I do have Dorico 4. Do you mean as a separate text or within the tempo display?
As a separate text. Tempo displays are quite conservative with the options you can show, and you’re outside the boundaries here. Use system text with a paragraph style that matches Immediate tempo style, and it will go seemlessly 
2 Likes
Will do, thank you. Works fine for my purposes.