Is it in the plans? I would be happy to change durations without deleting and inputting the note anew. Or am I missing something obvious here?
Bengt B
You’re not! It’s something we users have been asking for a long time. Just like for tuplets (the behavior has changed A LOT in those last updates as far as tuplets are concerned), the team is really listening and that’s great.
Thanks and yes, it’s great that the team is listening, let’s hope they find time to implement this as well, maybe its not as easy as it might seem.
I suspect it’s not as easy as it might seem because Force Duration is a property that lives with the note(s). Generally speaking a minim (half note) is a single note. If you split it into two tied crotchets (quarter notes) then Force Duration has to be applied to both the notes themselves and the tie. We don’t currently have a means of turning a minim/half into two tied crotchets/quarters without shortening and then lengthening the note, as far as I’m aware.
For what it’s worth it will be possible to set and unset Force Duration on existing notes and rests in the next update. Of course, setting Force Duration on an existing note will not itself change the duration of the note, so you won’t be able to take an existing (say) half note and tell Dorico that it should be notated as two tied quarter notes simply by setting Force Duration on it: for that you will still need to delete and reinput the note. But it will be useful for lengthening and shortening notes, or indeed for unsetting Force Duration if it was set and you want to go back to the normal duration (though of course you can do this already with Reset Appearance).
Daniel, will it do the opposite: turn two tied quarters into a half? That would reduce a huge amount of fiddly work after XML input for me.
Exactly, that’s what I need as well.
B.B.
Ben, are you aware that you can set Dorico to import rhythms exactly as originally specified, entirely ignoring Dorico’s Notation Options?
And yet she moves!
Yes, I have XML import set to import note durations, but for some reason it still doesn’t always bring them in verbatim. Most prevalent is splitting the note over the half-bar, even when I’ve also got as many options as I can find to NOT split at the half-bar.
The ability to ‘click-join’ those notes would be a boon.
Harrumph!
Of course the answer is: “it depends”. In theory, if the note has Forced Duration and it would otherwise be notated as a half note in its current rhythmic position, then yes, removing Force Duration will notate it as a half note. You can test that theory next time you encounter such a note by doing Reset Appearance on it: that removes Force Duration already.
Daniel, what I’d like is:
For a pair of tied notes that do not have FD applied, the ability to set FD, so that the two tied notes will become one note, regardless of the note grouping settings.
As you say, we can already remove FD with Reset Appearance.
Well, that’s not what the forthcoming ability to set Force Duration will do, for what it’s worth! That’s really a completely separate editing operation, to force a note to be written as a single notehead duration if possible. That may well be a useful thing for us to add at some point, but it’s not something we’re going to be able to do in this next update.
Dear Daniel,
I would love to have an easy solution to write the dotted halves two notes tremolos… We’ve already talked about it, and it’s quite hard (from a user point of view) to understand why Dorico does not handle a crotchet tied to a quaver note like it handles a dotted quarter for that matter… But if your new function makes it easier, I’ll see the half full glass! 
Well, thanks for suggestions and discussions. I find that I will have to wait with cleaning up my xml imports easily.
Bengt B
Hello,
I ran into the a question and found this old thread. Is there an update on this topic that I missed? maybe a new solution?
More specifically what benwiggy wrote up here, he was looking:
For a pair of tied notes that do not have FD applied, the ability to set FD, so that the two tied notes will become one note, regardless of the note grouping settings.
Nope. The quickest way to achieve this is to
- Select the existing (tied) notes.
- Turn on Force Duration.
- Type a number that corresponds with a note value that Dorico can automatically group as a single note (so in the case of a crotchet/quarter that Dorico is automatically grouping as two tied quavers/eighths, you could type 5 so that Dorico gives you a single quaver/eighth).
- Type the number that corresponds with the actual note value you want (6 in the case above).
this is one of this days when I swear I tried what you just wrote and didn’t work before.
Thanks pianoleo.
Hello. I just started using Dorico a few days ago and can not figure out how to make a chord with all of the notes as half notes, except the top note, which needs to be a single quarter note, followed by 2 eighth notes. Is this possible?
Welcome to the forum, VJT. When you need to show multiple notes of different note values simultaneously, you need to use multiple voices. Here’s a video to help you get started.