Hi, another unwashed member of the stampeding Finale->Dorico migration horde here.
Dorico is a magnificent app. You guys done REALLY good. I’m about a month in and really been in the Dorico woodshed and I gotta say it’s better than Finale. Better, faster, stronger.
But… FLOWS argh…
In theory you select all layouts and show never, right?
But I am CONSTANTLY turning flows off, over and over again. If you import something from XML, even if I then import my Dorico Library (which has flows show:never), I find parts in engrave with flow enabled. If I add an instrument in order to do doubles “the Dorico way” I have to shut flows off AGAIN in the condensed part.
It’s obnoxious. Flows simply have no place in jazz, rock, commercial, broadway, studio orchestra, recording music. It’s a classical convention that I’m sure is useful for a narrow demographic of composers/arrangers.
I know shift-cmd-L:Flows:select all:Never:Apply:Close is a ten-second operation but WAAAAAH I WANT ME BINKIE!!
It should be an option to turn on & off in preferences.
Once you’ve set this, you can Save As Default, and it should never bother you again. You’ll need to Save the defaults for both Full Scores and for Parts.
Can you explain this a bit more? I’m not sure I understand.
Any work that can be divided into sections will benefit from flows. A Broadway show, with scenes and songs will definitely want to use Flows. A Jazz book of standards, with each song as a Flow. A film score with scenes – anything!
Pretty sure a reason it may feel this way is that when working in other software it’s much more practical to keep every song/scene/cue in a separate file, so there’s many production pipelines in place where that’s the norm. But the abstract name flow was chosen precisely to be genre-agnostic, to be applicable far outside of the classical paradigm.
The “Dorico way” of doing instrument changes (eg Flute to Picc) is to have one player that holds 2+ instruments. So the part layout that Dorico generates automatically for that player suffices for all instruments.
If you’re talking about a condensing score, where you can only condense the first instrument held by each player and therefore instrument doubling has to be handled with separate players, then you don’t need to create a separate part necessarily: just assign additional players to the first player’s part layout (eg if you have Flute and Piccolo players, assign the Piccolo player to the existing Flute part layout).
As others have said, you can save your Layout Options as the default for all future projects (that you create with File > New; “project templates” can have their own settings, that’s part of the “project template” feature)
