Enhancement: My dream of the "play-along tab"

Dorico
1

Hi!
I have this dream about Doricos performance mode.

A little background. I play the bassoon in an amateur community orchestra. We sometimes play original music, sometimes adapt and arrange. Several of us use Dorico.

Here is how it could work. In preparation for a concert, our librarian publishes on our internal web site: the music to play and the Dorico files.

I as a musician start Dorico on my iPad and instruct the program to download the concert material. I get both the list of pieces and the Dorico files. I can now “play-along” the Dorico files in the new “play-along tab”. In the play-along tab my part is generally muted and the rest of the orchestra plays, changeable. It is possible for me to repeat sections and play them slower for my at home practice. In this play-along tab I can annotate and make colors but not change the part as such. Maybe the composer / arranger can “freeze” the sounds in the files, removing me to have a lot of sound libraries on my iPad.

At rehearsal and concert time we all bring our iPad-s and rehearse or perform the material. One favourite function of ForScore, the half-page turn is supported and i can use a foot pedal to turn pages.

When the composer / arranger or librarian finds that he wants to make some changes a new version of the concert is published on our the website. Players, like myself, can give a command to “update” with the new versions.

In the concert mode the material is locked and will optionally become hidden after the concert is done. It is possible to take out a “playlist” for reporting what music was played, how many there was in the audience or other information the license holders requires from the orchestra.

Well, a dream. Currently I create PDF-s for myself and import into ForScore instead. Works of course.

2

ghellquist,
can you hear the iPad sound, while you play the bassoon? Just being curious, I expect the bassoon to drown out the tiny iPad speakers…

3

Hi. Can´t hear the speakers on the iPad very well except when I play ppp. But works with headphones.

4

ah, of course, that makes sense.

5

It would be interesting if Dorico had some performance / live capabilities.

One simpler approach to this would be the addition of a loop playback mode in the transport bar, where you could also drag a cycle marker of selected bars (much like most DAWs), where it will then endlessly loop whatever you have selected. You currently already have the ability to mute/solo/isolate staves, and also override the tempo for playback only, so with a simple loop playback mode added, it would be easy for you to mute the Bassoon staff, loop a few bars, slow everything down, and practice along as needed!

There would be many other benefits for users to have a loop mode: including practicing along, transcription, and for composing, such as looping a section to try out different ideas.

This wouldn’t solve some of your ideas about freezing the score and collaboration, but I think it would be very helpful for practice purposes to be able to loop scores and selections.