It’s quite common in orchestration to double the notes of one instrument with another. (+/- an octave.)
I’d love to have a way to create a new Player ‘with the notes’ of another. This would be very useful, particularly in projects with lots of flows, where manually copying the notes in each flow is tedious and error-prone.
At the simplest level, just being able to duplicate a Player with its notes would suffice; and you could then change the instrument manually. (Currently, duplicating a Player gives you a new ‘empty’ staff.)
‘Linking’ the instruments, so that changes to the source continue to update the copy, would be needlessly complicated, IMO, as you’d have to then have a mechanism for ‘unlinking’ bits where the music was slightly different, or at a different octave, etc. (Cf. Finale’s now abandoned ‘Mirror’ tool… )
Both ways could have their advantages.
Logic call them Aliases.
Jesper
Edit: I’ve been thinking of something similar. Aliases that can be transposed, inverted, reversed… but still follow the “master” track/region
Then like in logic, can be turned into real copies…
And what is wrong with copy and paste special>explode? (apart from it only working for single source lines) It’s certainly neither tedious nor error prone.
It takes a chord in one staff, and splits the notes across several other staves. It’s the opposite of “Reduce”, which takes several staves and copies them onto one staff.
I get 9 results, which provide the relevant pages. Are you using a different language?
Not following the need for this - aren’t you already starting with your instrumental layout? If you said you’d like a shortcut to “Duplicated this players notes (or a selection) and give it to another player an octave up/down” that would make sense. However that should be doable with a script too, and maybe a better solution.
The team hasn’t had the time to prioritize scripting but it’s already very capable. In my day job over my career requests like this come in all the time, what I found is the best approach is to do a scripting system (Lua is a great choice) and let people do it themselves. More powerful, farther reach and doesn’t turn the app into a kitchen sink.
Elaborating on that point, Dorico is already a deep application, with extensive capabilities and configurability. IMO the user cognitive load in using it is at a ‘Pareto inflection’ meaning that the capability and usability are presently at about an optimal point. But as you add new capability the usability becomes endangered.
Consider DAW’s like Cubase/Nuendo. Also deep applications but IMO they’ve gone past this inflection point, with lots of redundant, fiddly capability. It’s a nightmare, if I don’t use Nuendo for a while the skills are lost, whereas I’ve gone long periods without time for Dorico but it’s still in my fingertips.
Scripting got an upgrade recently, you can now trigger scripts from the jump and shortcuts which is a huge boost. The strength of their solution is it appears they inserted a shim at a central MVC Controller dispatcher (just my guess), which means it basically works for everything. Fantastic. A downside is the commands are pretty specific. Like for this script it would be location aware, like you can only double a stave above, or write another to double two staves above.
So instead I’d prefer time going into generalizing scripting with variables, simple config GUI’s you can launch from the script, and a more generalized way of specifying location (such as “goto $StaveNameVariable bar $BarNumber” where the variables are taken from a GUI which the script pops up earlier.
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