We are proud to say that the Dorico forum is friendly, supportive and constructive, and it’s our aim to keep it that way. Members of the Dorico development and support teams closely monitor the forum, and this is the place you can have a direct conversation with the people responsible for designing and building the application. The forum is also frequented by many expert users of the software, who generously give of their time to offer assistance to their fellow users. In order to keep the discussion running smoothly on the forum, please give your consideration to the following guidelines:
- Search before you post
- Be polite
- Don’t bump threads
- Post a project, not a picture
Each of these guidelines is discussed in a little more detail below:
1. Search before you post
There’s a good chance the question you have, or the issue you’re experiencing, has been experienced by other users before you, and there will be at least one relevant thread for you to find. So please search before you post. The search feature on Discourse is very good: simply click the magnifying glass icon in the top right corner of any page and type your search term. For a more advanced search click the options link in the pop-up search box.
2. Be polite
This is not the kind of forum where flaming, abuse and insults are tolerated. The moderators reserve the right to lock threads, edit or delete posts for any reason. Fortunately we very rarely need to take these measures, but let’s keep it that way. If English is your first language, remember that is not the case for many of the posters in this forum, and please give everybody the benefit of the doubt even if you interpret their words as having an undesirable tone or undercurrent. Dissent and disagreement is of course allowed, as are complaints about the software. All we ask is that you remember that every word that appears on the forum has been typed by another human being. Treat them as you would like to be treated.
3. Don’t bump threads
You can rest assured that at least one member of the Dorico development team will read every thread on the forum. However, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to reply to every thread in a timely fashion. Every member of the team who frequents the forum does so in addition to his or her regular work duties, and those duties in general have to take precedence. If you absolutely require a reply from our support team, then contact support: you will find the appropriate contact details for support in your country on your MySteinberg page. I (@dspreadbury) in particular will keep threads with complex issues or questions open until I have the necessary time to look into the issue in sufficient detail. I don’t forget about these things. So: please don’t bump threads. It’s considered rude on this forum.
4. Post a project, not a picture
If you are having a problem with Dorico, the fastest way to get the help you need is to post the project, or a part of it, and not to post a screenshot. If you post a picture, you will almost certainly find that the first person to respond to your thread asks you to post the project. You may be concerned that the musical content of your project will be judged, or stolen. While we cannot guarantee that this will not happen, because of the supportive nature of the forum, this is vanishingly unlikely. There may be copyright or confidentiality restrictions that prevent you from posting the whole project. That’s fine! It’s always better in any case to cut the project down to a smaller size to attach it, particularly because there is a 4MB file size limit on attachments.
To cut down your project, first do File > Save As to save your project under a new name, to avoid making unwanted changes to your working project. If the project contains multiple flows, delete all flows except for the one that exhibits the problem. If the project contains multiple players, delete all players except for the one that exhibits the problem. If the problem is isolated to a particular bar or passage, then use the Shift+B popover to remove all other bars (e.g. select a note or rest in the bar after the problem passage, type Shift+B and enter a huge negative number like -9999 to delete all of the remaining bars in the flow).
Once you have cut down the project to the minimum scope that reproduces the problem, in Play mode choose Play > Playback Template and reapply the default playback template, or choose Silence. This dramatically reduces the file size of the project after you have deleted most of its musical material, because it removes the saved audio engine state.
Finally, attach the Dorico project it to your post.
If you want to add a picture as well (perhaps annotated to show where the problem exists), then by all means do so. But if your problem relates to a specific situation you’re experiencing in your project, you are guaranteed to get a more helpful answer more quickly when you include a suitable project file to reproduce the problem.