"follow playhead" playback in write mode

I’m disappointed with the playback in write mode. The playhead often goes off the screen to the right (this is in gallery view), and is inconsistent when the screen advances – sometimes the screen advances so the playhead is in the middle of the viewing area, sometimes it just goes ahead a measure or so so it’s still mostly to the right, and sometimes it advances so far the notes it plays are hidden behind the gray courtesy key signature and accidentals on the left. It’s difficult to read along with the score as it plays unless you are constantly manually adjusting it.

Is this something that might be improved in the future? My use case (coming from Finale) is that I frequently project material on the big screen in my HS and MS classrooms for students to sightread – the moving playhead is especially helpful for younger students. But with Dorico’s playback being this inconsistent and hard to follow, they won’t be able to follow it.

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Thanks for the feedback. Certainly I know that the playhead will sometimes start behind the “magic margin” in galley view, and this is something we could account for when moving the view. One thing we have discussed but not yet added is the ability to get Dorico to “turn early” when the playhead is approaching the end of the view.

For the time being, you might find that creating a layout that uses a page size that fits nicely in the view at a particular zoom level while showing the music at an appropriate size works better than using galley view: if you design the layout to fit “a screenful” of music, you should find that Dorico moves only once each system.

Thanks, I’ll try that.

Even in page mode, the playhead still goes off the screen. With a “screen size” page and zoom as you described above, it’s fine for the first page, but when it automatically advances to the second, it doesn’t reset all the way to the left edge of the screen, leaving a measure or two off-screen to the right, and the playhead then goes offscreen a little before advancing. It does this no matter how much “edge” or margin I leave – the screen advance always leaves notes offscreen to the right.

So I’m hoping for a fix at some point. And in the process, if there’s a way to get it to move smoothly (not continuous scrolling – just advance smoothly rather than herky-jerky), I’d think that was pretty cool also. :slight_smile: On the one hand, I can’t imagine too many people are have this use case (projecting write mode on a big screen). But on the other hand, just about everyone who uses notation software wants to be able to listen to their compositions play back and see the notes at the same time.

I have the same problem. I am using Dorico as my accompanist for my choir MS HS classes, and it isn’t clear to the students when they try to follow the music. Also, when I am trying to conduct following the gallery view, it is not helping to not see a few measures before