FR - Tuplet selection

When drag selecting, if a user selects any notes that are part of a tuplet, it would be great if Dorico would automatically select the tuplet. It is very likely that the user will want the tuplet selected in this situation and just didn’t drag high or low enough away from the staff. Even if they don’t, it’s a lot easier to delete an errant tuplet marking than it is to fix (or re-copy) all the music after the tuplet that is now screwed up. Thanks for considering!

Yeah I agree. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to copy and paste notes without their accompanying tuplet.

This has come up a number of times. The difficulty is that if you want to delete the selected notes, you might not want to remove the tuplet as well without it being explicitly selected, as that will be potentially quite a destructive edit. But I do agree that there are situations where you want the tuplet to be selected even without explicitly selecting it.

I still think selecting the tuplet automatically would be the vastly preferable option. I’m not so worried about the destructive edit you described above because the user would be looking directly at the bar being edited and could either CTRL-click the tuplet to deselect it, or simply just re-enter it. The huge problem with not having the tuplet selected IMO is that the user may be pasting or ALT-clicking a larger phrase elsewhere, so the entire phrase may not be visible on screen, and the error may not be caught. Any tuplet deletion in the bar being edited would be instantly noticeable as the user is looking directly at it.

This is obviously user-error, but I was on a deadline yesterday morning and twice got to the layout stage only to find issues where the rhythms were massively screwed up due to large scale copy and paste procedures that didn’t have the tuplet selected. I would much rather deal with any tuplet selection issue when I’m actually editing the bar with the tuplet, rather than worry about proofreading potential copy and paste errors at a later stage in the project. Adding additional proofreading steps when pasting really can add time to a job, so I personally would much rather be able to drag select and not worry about making sure the boundary fully contains the tuplet.

The other difficulty is that if you’re selecting a passage in order to alter the properties of Notes, you need to select just notes for those properties to become available in the panel.
At the point that you make a drag selection (or any type of selection), Dorico can’t predict what your next move is.

Ok, filter for Notes & Chords then. If I click one note, then shift-click another, any tuplet in between is selected. I’m not really sure why drag-selecting should be any different. A tuplet marking is integral to the note as any note carries both pitch and duration content. Leaving part of the duration content out when drag selecting seems about as logical as not including a dot in a dotted quarter just because I didn’t include the dot in my drag selection.

Putting something like this on a music stand is every copyist’s nightmare:

If I’m working on a rush job (aren’t they all?) and don’t have time/money to hire a proofreader or thoroughly do it myself, I really need to make sure that pasting is working reliably without having to scroll and proof the entire passage unnecessarily. Putting a mistake like the above on a stand at a studio date could legitimately be over a thousand dollar mistake if you have 50 musicians at scale + studio time and it takes 15 minutes to sort out and fix what happened. Not to mention your personal reputation and possible loss of a client. Drag selecting reliability far outweighs any filtering or deletion inconvenience IMO.

I take it you haven’t tried filtering for notes and chords…
(Or rather, you haven’t tried shift-selecting a passage and then filtering for notes and chords. In this situation the tuplets are retained - for your benefit, not mine.)

Click and shift-click selects everything on the stave(s) between the two clicks.

Drag-selecting selects (only) what is inside the box you drag.

Two different tools for two different purposes, IMO.

Not true. I can drag a box around a dotted note, deliberately leave the dot out of the box, and it gets included anyway. The dot contains information related to duration just as a tuplet does. Why include the dot but not the tuplet?

The dot is a property of the note. The tuplet is a separate entity. Daniel explained this pretty clearly above - name a situation where you’d want to delete a note but not its dot.

Musically though they function the same - they both modify the duration of a given note. I can’t think of a situation where I’d want to copy a note but not its tuplet, especially when the downside to not copying it has the potential to be so catastrophic both musically and financially.

(and you’re right about the filtering above, I should have checked that before posting, oops)

I can think of situations where I have done just that. For example copying notes between similar passages where the time signature changed from 2/4 to 6/8. Or changing the way a passage was engraved from triplets to sextuplets.

Good example, but surely this is an outlier though, probably equal to the number of times the user will be going the other way and won’t want a dot to copy when going from 6/8 to 2/4. The vast majority of the time I imagine users will want the tuplet to be selected to copy.

Got burned badly by this again today. I guess I need to completely unlearn my Select More 3x behavior and never use it again as it just isn’t safe to use. Creating a shortcut for Select to End of Flow and using it seems to be the way to go as it will include tuplets.

It’ll work fine as long as you start by selecting a note and a tuplet. If you only select a note, Select More will only Select More Notes.

I have to agree with Todd on this one. If I select a note and Select More to grab the whole bit, I’m not always thinking whether there’s a tuplet somewhere down the line. This still feels wrong to me… for whatever that’s worth.

I can’t say that I approve of the fact that hidden tuplets don’t get copied if their signposts are turned off, but I do approve of Select More working consistently.
If you want to copy a bunch of notes but you don’t want the dynamics, playing techniques and other accoutrements, select the passage, then Filter Notes and Chords.

I feel like I should explain my reasons for being quite so militant about Select More working the way it does:
There has to be a quick way to select notes and get the relevant properties in the bottom panel, quickly, in order to:

  1. Delete a bunch of fingerings quickly
  2. Turn on lv ties
  3. Make cue-sized
    etc.

There are plenty of good ways to select a passage in order to copy it. There is only one way to quickly get a selection of only notes, and it is Select More.

Often there won’t be a tuplet on screen, and like Dan said I’m not even thinking about if there’s one somewhere later in the flow. Sometimes I’ve had rhythms messed up due to dragging errors, but today Select More 3x was definitely the culprit. It’s fast and doesn’t involve learning another shortcut, but it’s definitely not safe to use when selecting elements that are off-screen so I guess gotta unlearn that one and only use Select to End of Flow.

I still think not selecting the tuplet with the note makes about as much sense as not selecting a dot with a note as they both modify the duration. Notes contain both pitch and duration information. Copying all of that info when notes are selected except in the case of a tuplet seems like Dorico is leaving behind one particular type of duration information for no good reason. (I’m sure there’s a programming reason, just not a musical one.)