Foot Pedal Switch and Dorico

Hello, is there a way to tell Dorico not to respond to a USB foot pedal I’m using in conjunction with other software that is running simultaneously? I don’t think there is any MIDI data coming from the pedal; it’s just a 3 button USB foot pedal that I am using to “fast forward, play & rewind” in another program. But in Dorico Write Mode while using the Input Caret, if I press a button on the foot switch, it takes me out of the Input Caret, which I don’t want it to do. I really just want it to ignore the foot pedal altogether. I posted this question 20 days ago with no response so thought I would reframe the question and hopefully receive an answer. Thank you.

The Pedal must be sending something – it’ll either be MIDI or computer keyboard keys, such as Enter, Left, Right.

Is the pedal listed as an input device in Dorico’s Preferences > Play? If so, you can uncheck it.

If it’s sending keyboard keys, then you can’t do much about that without disconnecting it.

I use my foot pedal with Transcribe in the background and Dorico input active all the time without any problem. Whatever is causing an issue, I’m guessing isn’t a default behavior. In Preferences / Key Commands did you program any MIDI Key Commands? At least for me the pedals register as CC67, CC66 and CC64 from left to right. If you have anything mapped to those CC values, then that’s where Dorico is getting that behavior from.

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Thanks to you both for the replies and suggestions. To answer you questions: 1) Under Preferences>Play>MIDI Input Devices, the only item there (and checked) is my MIDI interface (iRig MIDI 2). (Incidentally, under Recording, Import CC64 as pedal lines and Snap pedal lines to previous beat are both checked but I don’t know that this is the issue ?). 2) Key Commands is empty so MIDI Key Commands were not programmed.

Also, I too used Transcribe (that’s the other program to which I was referring.) But I closed that down so just Dorico is running and the Foot Pedal is still taking me out of Input mode. The Foot Pedal in question is a VEC Infinity 3, and relatively new. It does not interact with Finale. I’m really stumped about this and it’s obviously affecting my workflow in a negative way.

ALSO, I just discovered that it will “toggle” me in out of input mode by pressing any foot pedal button.

From a quick Google of the model, the pedal sends CTRL-F9, SHIFT-F9, and CTRL-SHIFT F9 by default. None of those disengage Note Entry for me.

You can configure the keys that the pedal sends. So what keys are yours sending?

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It appears that it is toggling the Shift N (Note Input) (Mac.) But it’s random. It doesn’t do it consistently. I can tap a button once and nothing happens, then a few rapid taps and if I have a note highlighted in Write mode it will open up the Caret. Then maybe one tap will take me out of it. But it seems that a note or notes have to be highlighted for a button to trigger the Caret.

What keys are the pedal configured to send?

There was no configuration on my part. It was an “out of the box” plug and play pedal. No software that came with it. I only want to use it for Transcribe and configured the buttons within the Transcribe app to do what I wanted it to do.

FredGUunn, just out of curiosity, what pedal are you using with Transcribe? You say yours doesn’t interfere with Dorico. If I can’t get this resolved, I may need to get a different pedal.

Fred, would you mind telling me what Foot Pedal you are using? Thanks so much.

I’m using the Nord pedals that came with my Nord Piano 4. Try opening your user keycommands_en.json file (if using English) and see if there are any entries for CC67, CC66, or CC64. If there are, try removing that line of code. (Make a backup first.) The file will be located at Users/yournamehere/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 5/keycommands_en.json on a Mac.

Have you programmed any other MIDI devices to work with Dorico? It’s possible another programmed device could be using those CCs too.

I have a Kurzweil K2600 connected to a MIDI iRig interface. That is the only configuration I have.

As a follow up to this post, and how I solved it, I bought a Elegato/Streamdeck foot pedal and ditched the VEC pedal. Because you can specifically tell the Streamdeck foot pedal which app. you want it to pay attention to (e.g. Transcribe!), this completely took care of the problem. It does not trigger Dorico commands like the VEC pedal did.. While I didn’t want to buy another pedal and perhaps the problem could have been solved a different (cheaper?) way, sometimes you go with the option that provides the least amount of hassle. In my case, this was it. Thanks for the attempts to help.

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