Feature suggestion: Renaming VST's & Improvements in Play Mode

Dear Dorico-Team,

First of all, thank you for the amazing effort you put into this program :slight_smile:

I stumbled upon 2 things that I wished worked better, and I don’t know if you already considered them (they might even be available already without me having noticed it) :

1) Renaming your VST’s in Play Mode

When working on an Orchestral score, I most of the time open several instances of a 3rd party instrument, e.g. East West’s “Play”
My problem is that every instance of the instrument is called “Play”, which gets confusing after I opened a couple of them. Which “Play” is which one? :confused:

Is there a way to rename them ? :slight_smile:

2) Improvements for Play Mode

Currently, some of my most important suggestions for play mode are that

a) When exporting to an audio file or while simply just playing back, Dorico does not yet take transposing instruments into account. This means that for the proper sound of a double bass, I actually need to write the score one octave lower than it would normaly be, as in real life it would already be sounding an octave lower.

ButI think I read somewhere that you are working on that feature already :slight_smile:

b) Dorico also does not yet take repeat endings, D.S. and likewise into account while playback.

I think you are working on that feature as well, and I am by no means saying it is easy. This probably takes way more work than most of us can imagine :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot :smiley:

Andy :slight_smile:

There’s no way to rename VST instruments in Play mode, but I agree this would be useful and I hope we’ll be able to add this in due course.

For your double bass, make sure you use the appropriate expression map: it’s possible to account for the octave transposition of your playback device by instructing Dorico to transpose by one or more octaves. Take a look at the ‘Transpose up 1 octave’ expression map in Play > Expression Maps for an example.

Thank you very much Daniel, really appreciate it! :smiley:

++ 1

Since Dorico does not have VST3 support for multiple MIDI inputs, it requires that there be quite a few VE Pro instances. In VE Pro I can name my instances to make it clear what each contains. In Cubase I can add custom names to VST instances so that any assignments make it absolutely clear which instance is being connected or assigned.

But in Dorico all my VE Pro instances have the same name. Looking at them in VST Instruments list in Play Mode, they all have the same name. And you face the same problem when assigning an instance to an instrument from the dropdown list.

Daniel said above he hopes this can be added in due course. I hope due course comes sooner rather than later. Using Dorico I have ten instances of VE Pro to work with.

In the meantime, the next update will support the multiple input midi ports of VE Pro.

Woe, TERRIFIC! Thanks, Paul.

In Cubase I can add custom names to VST instances so that any assignments make it absolutely clear which instance is being connected or assigned.

But in Dorico all my VE Pro instances have the same name. Looking at them in VST Instruments list in Play Mode, they all have the same name. And you face the same problem when assigning an instance to an instrument from the dropdown list.
vidmate.software/

This is on our list for a future version