I bought a Sibelius license a decade ago and never could really use the program because it had this tendency for the screen to jump all ver the place. Extremely disorienting, really maddening. At the time, Sibelius supported only page view. It is understandable that page view would jump around as music is added. So I put it on the shelf and kept using Finale.
Once Sibelius added scroll view, I paid for an upgrade. But I still could never get settled with it.
I was hoping that Dorico would not have this “whack a Mole” problem, at least in Galley View. But now that I am working on a larger score, it seems like every minute or two, Dorico decides on its own to jump left or right, even up or down. This should NEVER happen while editing in Galley view. The whole point of Galley View, it seems to me, is to have a steady writing surface.
Is anybody else experiencing this? If this doesn’t get fixed I don’t think I will have the mental stamina to use this product.
Dorico won’t be moving the view randomly, but it will certainly decide to move the view when it thinks it needs to in order to bring something selected into view. Can you be a bit more specific about the situations under which you find the view moves? Screenshots and/or screen capture videos are helpful in trying to figure this out.
I will try, but the point is I am concentrating on other things. I suppose the movement always happens in response to some mouse click, but it can move 40 measures away, not just a little bit. And I don’t see why it should ever move in the vertical direction.
Could it be anything to do with zooming in or out?
For me, when I zoom in or out in Galley view and nothing is selected, Dorico often jumps several flows to the left or right, rather than zooming centred on the currently displayed material as you might expect.
The problem is more noticeable in large scores, because there is enough space in the score for the view to be displaced a long way. It happens also in small scores, but the effect is less noticeable because (I guess) there isn’t enough material for Dorico to be able to displace you very far from your starting point.
The nervous tic I’ve developed in order to counteract this is always to select something before zooming. Then zooming centres on the selected object.
This may well be completely unrelated to your problem, but I thought I’d suggest it.
Yes, happens to me as wel with zooming without having something selected first. The score moves seemingly randomly to another spot. Isn’t it possible to make it zoom to the center of the score you are looking at without selecting something first?
Here is one small example. I am in full score mode. I select a whole rest in the leftmost measure. The measure is only 2/3 in view, but that’s enough to select the whole rest. Then I type “P” to play from that point. Dorico immediately shoots the selected measure to the right about 80% of the screen width, so the windows now begins about 4 measures to the left of the selected measure.
That isn’t too disorienting because there is a play cursor to draw your eye to the playback point, but such a big jump is still disconcerting. It isn’t too bad in playback but when these happen while editing, it is as if somebody is standing behind me, occasionally hitting me in the head with a 2x4 for no good reason. “Why did you do that?”
Certainly I agree that Dorico should do a better job of zooming around what is currently in view when nothing is selected, and we are certainly going to do some more work in that area.
I notice that when I CLICK/SHIFT-CLICK a large (multi-screen) selection for cutting and pasting, Dorico sometimes skips back to the starting measure and other times does not.
Just for the record, it does not seem to me that 2.1 has relieved any of the Whack-a-mole problems. It might actually be worse. This is extraordinarily frustrating. I give Dorico very high marks in many areas, but in this respect, it is a F-minus and at times makes me have to take a break because it is so disruptive to concentration.
It is absolutely not cases where the screen contents are shifted to bring something into focus that makes logical sense. In most cases, the movements are random and totally disorienting. On a large score, sometimes it can take a full minute for me to find my way back to where I was.
I’ve had a similar experience. The score will regularly jump to random locations. And moving the cursor to the right to select notes will sometimes jump to an entirely different staff (usually at the other end of the ensemble), even though there are notes continuing in the staff I had been working on. It’s thoroughly disorienting.
And I should add, this afternoon I received a call from a band leader who was panicked because I gad given him a non-transposed tenor sax part. Somehow all other wind instruments had their layout set to be transposing, but not the tenor sax. I’ll have to dig into how that could have happened because when I originally did that arrangement, I don’t even think I knew where to control the transposing setting.
Anyway, the band leader asked if while I was fixing that, could I also add a flute part? I had 2 hours before rehearsal, so I agreed to do that.
I thought that was plenty of time, but then this whack-a-mole business started and I found myself making changes in the wrong sections of the score. It was maddening. I had to throw away 30 minutes work because I could not be certain I hadn’t fouled up the whole thing. I did get it done. But I only survived that because every time the whack-a-mole happened, I stopped, took a deep breath, went back to the beginning of the score and scrolled to the right place.
I owned a Sibelius license from 2005 onward and never could use the %$%#$ thing because of that same whack-a-mole behavior. Finale never does that. Please fix this. it is important.
I had problems with both Sibelius and Dorico - the screen would occasionally move around. Very difficult when you were editing things precisely. In the end I stopped using the Apple Magic Mouse and bought a Logitech Master MX25. It hasn’t happened in Dorico since (I haven’t checked Sibelius).
I need some more concrete information in order to be able to do anything about this, Craig. Can you perhaps take a screen capture that shows the kind of disorientating movement you’re experiencing? Although it is certainly true that exactly what gets selected as you navigate with the arrow keys in Write mode is hard to predict, and it is also true that if you zoom in and out without any item selected Dorico does not keep the right bar in view, I have never experienced a problem where e.g. simply inputting notes ends up taking me to an unexpected part of the score, and that is not something that is often reported (and with thousands of users I would certainly expect it to be). So I think there must be something specific going on that, if we can find it, we can fix it, but we’ll need some more information to do that.
Daniel, I bet it is a case that most Dorico users are former Sibelius users, and SIbelius did the same sorts of things. People may be thinking this is just the way the universe has to be. Many of those users also may be comfortable working in Page mode. I always work in Galley mode – precisely to avoid the jumping that is inherent in Page mode.
I don’t know the exact conditions where things go wrong. It seems very random, which is what makes it so disorienting. The most error-inducing / maddening problems result from random horizontal movement. But there are also completely pointless vertical movements that are irritating at the least. I have noticed n the vertical jumps that there is absolutely nothing that should have triggered a vertical shift – i.e. no elements that were automatically re-positioned to a place that would require a vertical shift in order to see. It often shifts the view such that the top half of the screen is completely empty.
Thanks, precise observations would really help to understand the problems you’re having.
I don’t have any data to support your assertion that most Dorico users are former Sibelius users, but you may be right. I assume that in Finale, it does move the score automatically to keep the selection and/or input cursor in view. It would be interesting to know more about how Finale works if you presumably find that more amenable.
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