Feature Requests - misc.

Dorico
#1

I’ve just installed the 1.1 demo and am encouraged by the progress. Below are a few things I’m looking forward to:

  1. Addition of Marcato to articulation playback definitions, in terms of % note duration

  2. Winged repeat barlines - possibly frivolous, but useful

  3. Jazz Articulations - scoops, short and long falloffs - imperative for my jazz publishing company

  4. Swing playback - also imperative for my jazz publishing company

  5. This might already exist, but I haven’t found it yet - individual note midi velocity editing.

  6. Ability to move bar number below the staff. It currently appears that they are only available above the staff.

  7. Importation/translation of Sibelius’ Rhythm Section Assistant plug-in - invaluable for all big band scores.

  8. In the Print dialogue, it currently appears that each Layout (part/score - I hope I’m using the correct terminology) to be printed requires that a new printer must be manually assigned if the user’s default printer is different from the printer to be used with the Layouts. (That’s an awful sentence - I hope you can follow it). In the future, it would be great to be able to just assign the printer once to the global printing of the score and all its parts/Layouts. Manually resetting this for 20 staves, for example, is tiresome and can be avoided, I’d think.

  9. Will there be a version of Sib’s Magnetic Layout for Staff Optimization/Vertical Spacing? In Engrave mode, if I manually lower a staff to create more room, the other staves get jumbled on top of each other making it necessary to manually readjust every staff in the score. Again, I’m new, so maybe I’m missing the solution?

  10. I know there is Ctrl+G to go to a particular bar #, but it’s really handy in Sib to just Ctrl+Shift and click a bar to select a playback start point. Also, when a bar is selected across the score (top to bottom), it’s great to use Cntrl+Click to select and deselect certain staves so you can easily hear different subsets of an ensemble. Right now Halion/Dorico is behaving very strangely re: playback so I can’t tell if my request is already implemented or not.

Keep up the great work. I know you have a million things on your list already, but I can speak for a large local community of jazz and commercial composers who are just waiting to jump to Dorico once all the necessary features are implemented.

#2

  1. Notation options -> Bar numbers

  2. Holding Alt while dragging should do the trick. I also missed this feature until Daniel told me. I wonder if this might be more intuitive if it was opposite - drag to move all systems, alt+drag to move a single system (maybe I’m just trapped in my Sibelius habits).

#3

IIRC what you recall from Sibelius is the Finale arrangement as well.

#4
  1. The current playback options are merely to cater for (help) simple libaries with a limited set of sampled articulations, such as Halion. Many users are apparently awaiting more idiomatic handling of libraries such as Vienna Symphonic Library, and then the playback options scheme will ideally have to be bypassed or revised/extended. Generally this is work in progress, so changes will certainly occur. Having said that, Marcato is available in the playing techniques for Expression maps, and can be used right now with libraries containing such samples/functionality.

2-3-4-5) not there yet.

  1. At least on Windows, the default system printer is automatically selected for every layout.

  2. Selecting any note and hitting P will start playback from that note. Not super flexible, but you can easily configure layouts containing common/frequent groups of players and use them for selective playback

#5

Thanks, fratveno. Let me explain further.

  1. Marcato, or “house top” accents are frequently used in jazz music and it’s very helpful to have the playback accomodate them, regardless of the sample library being used. All I’m asking is that the marcato marking be included in the same list as staccato, tenuto, etc. and given a duration % adjustment. It has nothing to do with the traditional marcato accent, but everything to do with jazz performance technique.

  2. Yes, I’m on Windows. My point is that since I use a second printer, not my little desktop inkjet, I am currently forced to go through every part in the score and manually make that change. What I’m asking is that there be a global selection in the Print dialogue so I can make the change once instead of 20 times.

  3. In Sib, the Magnetic Layout prevents staves from going “off the page” and keeps them acceptably spaced as much as possible automatically. While I can manually move a staff, all the others automatically adjust. There is also a Layout Optimization feature for specific spots that need attention. The overall point is that the process is automatic, not manual. I’m hoping Dorico will incorporate this automatic functionality so that hours aren’t lost on each score manually moving everything around.

As For Finale, I only have limited experience with that program, but it IS possible to move staves “off the page”, although I think there is a correction available when that happens. I remember it as a fairly clunky process. Please don’t do that.

  1. Good to know about hitting P. Does that play the entire score or just that instrument? Having to go to the extra step of configuring extra groups is hardly convenient. I often need to check varying combinations of instruments in varying passages and it would just clutter things up to keep adding multiple Layouts every time I wanted to hear a custom playback.
#6

andgle - re: 6) Bar Numbers

Bar numbers do not appear in Notation Options. They appear in Engraving Options, but positioning is not available there, only case and enclosure parameters.

#7

Layout Options/Bar Numbers…

#8

Sorry, I meant Layout options

#9

I’m certainly not disagreeing, my point was merely that the target library must be able to respond to whatever playback parameters get generated.

  1. Yes, I’m on Windows. My point is that since I use a second printer, not my little desktop inkjet, I am currently forced to go through every part in the score and manually make that change. What I’m asking is that there be a global selection in the Print dialogue so I can make the change once instead of 20 times.

Again, I fully understand, but you could set your other printer as system default for the duration of the session. As a work around of course. Many programs do remember the last selected printer for the duration of an open session, so I agree this would be preferable.

  1. In Sib, the Magnetic Layout prevents staves from going “off the page” and keeps them acceptably spaced as much as possible automatically. While I can manually move a staff, all the others automatically adjust. There is also a Layout Optimization feature for specific spots that need attention. The overall point is that the process is automatic, not manual. I’m hoping Dorico will incorporate this automatic functionality so that hours aren’t lost on each score manually moving everything around.

I’d say that Dorico tries to accomplish this automatically as well, provided one specifies a reasonable staff/rastral and paper size.

As For Finale, I only have limited experience with that program, but it IS possible to move staves “off the page”, although I think there is a correction available when that happens. I remember it as a fairly clunky process. Please don’t do that.

Although I played with Sibelius back in the Acorn days and chatted with the Finns on the phone almost every month, my experience is basically 95% with Finale, and YES, it is indeed possible to move everything off the page. While Finale is certainly no role model for notation software innovation, it is just about as totally open and flexible as one can reasonably expect, and it is therefore always possible to fake just about anything, of course given time and inclination :slight_smile:

  1. Good to know about hitting P. Does that play the entire score or just that instrument? Having to go to the extra step of configuring extra groups is hardly convenient. I often need to check varying combinations of instruments in varying passages and it would just clutter things up to keep adding multiple Layouts every time I wanted to hear a custom playback.

Yes, every staff included in each layout will play back. Not ideal, as I said, but when comfortable with the program it’s better than nothing. One may also have the MIXER window open and solo/mute tracks as necessary. I assume this is working in 1.1 but haven’t actually tried it as I type…

#10

Additionally you can also solo/mute tracks directly in Play mode

#11

Fratveno:

I guess I’m not making myself clear enough regarding the marcato/house top issue. It’s a simple matter of Mid note length and doesn’t matter what sound is being triggered. It can be a sample or a synth. All that matters is that the midi note length is available to me to as an editable %. Simple as that. If a staccato marking can be defined as 50% duration of a given note in Play/Playback Options/Timing/Note Durations, then I should be able to assign say, 67% for a marcato. That’s all I’m asking - please add marcato to that current list of articulations.

Re: printers - I could do several things as workarounds, but it should be a simple matter to select a printer once and have it apply to every layout in the file. Sibelius and Finale do it that way. Why would you need to print on multiple printers for a given file and how often would that scenario arise? Do you agree that it’s easier and quicker to set the printer only once with a global setting rather than 20 times (once per Layout) as it now? This really needs to be changed in future updates.

Re: Automatic staff layout and optimization. May I humbly suggest you spend a little time with Sibelius and see how effortless they’ve made it. At the professional level of software, and as a professional composer and publisher, I have neither the time nor interest in “faking” anything. I need all my staves on the page at all times and properly spaced or compensated for. It’s hard to believe that the professional world accommodates anything less. Since Dorico is being written by the former Sibelius team, I’m expecting something similar. Anything less would be a huge step backwards and would prevent me from purchasing Dorico at all, much less moving me entire publishing catalog over to it.

#12

This should be relatively straightforward to add, so we’ll try to include this soon.

Definitely on our backlog for the future.

Likewise.

Ditto.

This is indeed not yet possible on a per-note basis, but we are planning to add it to Play mode soon.

As you’ve already been informed, you can do this via the Bar Numbers page of Layout Options. You cannot at the moment have bar numbers both above and below the system, or show bar numbers on multiple staves, and we plan to improve that in future.

We plan features to create rhythm cues and to handle the creation of passages of slashes.

This can indeed be avoided: simply click one layout in the Layouts list on the left-hand side in Print mode, then hold Shift and click on the last layout in the list, which will select them all. Now any changes you make on the right-hand side will apply to all of the selected layouts.

Dorico in fact always automatically moves staves and systems to avoid collisions between items on adjacent staves, so it doesn’t have a feature like Optimize Staff Spacing in Sibelius, since it doesn’t need it. You should not in general need to make adjustments using the staff spacing tool in Engrave mode. First, see if you can get the results you want by adjusting the settings on the Vertical Spacing page of Layout Options, which provides a more comprehensive set of options for the default gaps between staves and systems than you would find on the Staves page of Engraving Rules in Sibelius.

At the moment, when you play back, all of the instruments in the current layout will be played back, and it doesn’t matter which staves you had selected when you started playback. I’m sure that we will spend some time in this area in future to make it easier to play back just a selection of instruments without needing to use the Mute/Solo buttons in the Mixer, but for now that’s your best bet – that, or creating a dummy layout that contains the combination of instruments you’re particularly interested in and playing that back.

#13

First, thank you, Daniel, for the reminder that I can adjust the position of measure numbers.

Second, when you take another pass at measure numbers, are there any plans to allow us to assign different fonts/styles to the measure numbers in different layouts? I usually put measure numbers in the score below and in a larger, bolder font style than I do for parts.

Thanks.

#14

Yes, I think we should allow you to choose the font style to be used for bar numbers on a per-layout basis. This is on our backlog.

#15

I hope the same will be true for lyrics as well. I ran into a situation where I had written a new hymn SATB. I decided to create a second layout to create a congregational version that was melody only with larger text. Since the ATB had been cut out I had plenty of room to increase both score and text sizes. The SATB version naturally necessitated a compromise on score and lyric sizes to fit it all onto one page but when I went to adjust the text on the totally separate layout I was surprised to find my SATB layout all wonky. I can see the elegance in having certain settings apply globally, but I’m sure you can understand where allowing you to change them independently is useful too. (Although, as usual, I wouldn’t be surprised if you all are already one step ahead of me.)