Been trying to start up working in Dorico again, and imported one of my scores from MusicXML. Ok so far. However having some basic problems that are driving me crazy. Searched help and got nowhere.
On the play tab. For some reason, when I open the mixer window (mixer button at top), it goes full screen, to the point where it’s bigger than my screen, clips stuff to the left, and no scroll bars. So I can’t move it, resize it, or change it to not full screen. F11 simply alters full-screen-ness of the main Dorico window, not the mixer window. So, I can’t even see channel labels to know which channel I am working with. There needs to be a button in the top there to toggle full-screen-ness.
I can’t access the Fx on mix bus any other way. I can’t seem to show this in the docked mix window that comes up when you show mix from that lower button from the panel at the bottom of the play window. This seems to be a cut-down version of the mixer. Why???. Would be great to just be able to show the same stuff in there.
Also I note there are no tool-tips on any buttons. This is basic. Many of the icons are indeed self-explanatory, but some are not, and having to execute the action in order to find out what it is, is really not good design.
Also, there’s no colour differentiation between the window frame at the top, and the top of the client area, so some parts of this you can use to drag or max/min the window, and some you can’t, and it’s not clear where this boundary lies. Maybe should be a slightly different colour.
Is there any way to make the separate mix window go out of full screen mode? Note F11 does not work for this.
Also, so I put my fabfilter on the mix bus. All good
But can I move the window? Not for the life of me.
EDIT: After dragging the size around a bit, eventually a window frame showed up and let me move the window. So this is clearly a bug that it wasn’t just showing from the start.
SOLVED: this isn’t really a solution. In the end I used the windows hotkey to access the system menu (alt + space) and chose size to resize the window. Once it was smaller it showed a window frame which allowed me to move it.
It’s possible it was doing this from some default size remembered or set. I hadn’t opened this window for a long time (prior to upgrading to 4). My screen is 4k and has never been bigger than that, so I don’t know where it would get a bigger size from.
Probably the best fix would be
a) make F11 work
b) add a button with the same icon that is used in video player apps to go full screen or exit full screen. there are existing icons for this.
c) add tooltips to all buttons.
Sorry that you had a bad experience with the size of the Mixer, @adrien. Dorico does preserve the size and position of each window, including the Mixer, and at one stage I believe there was a bug that could mean that each time you opened it, it would incorrectly include the height of the caption bar in the saved size, resulting in the window growing in size by the height of the caption bar each time. That is fixed these days, but perhaps you had run into this problem when it was kicking around, and the result was that the Mixer ended up with a client size larger than your display.
We know that the absence of tool tips in these newer bits of Dorico’s interface is a big impediment, and it’s something we have been working on recently, so it will be addressed in the next version of the software.
One thing I would suggest relating to screen size.
Screens can actually change size at any time, as the user changes resolution or scaling, plugs monitors in or out.
There are several ways apps deal with this. If there is stored screen layout, it’s typical to do a sanity check at the point that these stored details are applied - check that the window will be not bigger than the monitor it is on, or off-screen and that the monitor exists still. You can also receive notifications on change (at least on Windows you can).
Probably the minimum requirement is the sanity check. Otherwise people may run into this problem if they resize their screens smaller (e.g. scale up). I’ve apps where you cannot access a window if the monitor is removed and the app was on it, and the only fix is another app which allows you to move windows (I wrote one a long time ago) or to plug the monitor back in (not always possible) or hack the storage of the position to reset it. Even a command in the app to reset all screen positions to defaults could at least provide a way back from this.
Monitors and their setup are a lot more dynamic these days that’s for sure.