I frequently re-adjust existing hairpins by mouse. I’ve noticed a strange thing as of the latest update, where it’s not allowing me to adjust hairpins using the mouse by the note grid value – only by the nearest existing note value. So in other words if I have a whole note, I can only adjust by whole notes.
However, if I use the keyboard shortcut to adjust length by note grid, or the caret input, this is not a problem.
I am not sure if a setting changed somewhere after the installation but I’m trying to understand how I can get back the behavior I’d been used to using the mouse.
I work in Dorico daily and had been doing it all the time in previous versions literally up until the last one. Maybe that was a bug or some kind of anomaly?! But I definitely did it often, ingrained in muscle memory so I have been surprised this week discovering it doesn’t work for me suddenly. Curious if there is a way to rollback the version to test and confirm on my end.
That’s interesting. This is en entry from the Dorico 4.3 and 5.1 User Manual:
When using the mouse, you can only move and lengthen/shorten dynamics to noteheads. When using the keyboard, you can move and lengthen/shorten dynamics according to the current rhythmic grid resolution.
Strange. I did this all the time with the mouse only, as it’s intuitive for me. I see something, I drag. Done. I actually do it very often to adjust hairpins so they they aren’t attached to the following barline as they always want to do – which presents problems for adding new bars or edits – so more often than not I simply drag them over using the mouse just slightly, and it never mattered if I had a whole note!
Perhaps I should be clear in saying – I think the mouse adjustment was based on note-grid value, but of that I am not certain. But what I am certain is that I was able to make micro adjustments via mouse, in write mode, regardless of note values such as whole notes, allowing me to place the hairpin to start in the middle of the note if I wanted, or to ensure it’s not attached to the following barline as mentioned.
Indeed, the new version is the culprit for me. I found an installation for the previous 5.1.40 and immediately the hairpin micro adjustment via mouse is working perfectly as I was used to.
And, I was able to confirm by adjusting the grid that indeed, it is based on grid value.
If this was never an official feature in the manual, it was perhaps something which was enabled inadvertently without intention by the developers.
You can see in this video back in 5.1.40 how I can do micro adjustments on a bar which has a whole note, and as I switch grid value you can hopefully tell how it’s snapping according to that note value as it gets larger.
This is rather important to my workflow, even though I otherwise use the keyboard heavily for many other things. Hoping @dspreadbury can chime in as to whether or not this is a bug in the newest release or an intentional change. If so I would love to have mouse adjustment back – thank you!
@wing I just found this in the Dorico 5 Version History:
Mouse editing.
When dragging dynamics in Write mode with the mouse, the positions that the dynamics will snap to are now consistent with the positions at which the dynamics can appear when moving them via the Alt+←/→ shortcuts.
It is an intentional change. The previous behaviour was introduced in Dorico 5.0.20, and was intended to make the behaviour when dragging items with the mouse consistent with using Alt+left/right to move them. The motivation was also to make it possible to drag e.g. a dynamic “through” bars that didn’t contain notes (e.g. empty bars, or bars that contain bar repeat regions), which was possible with the keyboard but not with the mouse.
However, this introduced a regression of its own, which is that Ctrl+Shift+Alt+left/right, which should shorten/lengthen an item to the next note position, no longer worked; instead, it did the same as Shift+Alt+left/right to shorten/lengthen an item by the grid value.
So in Dorico 5.1.50, we have undone the change introduced in Dorico 5.0.20, which ensures that Shift+Alt+left/right and Ctrl+Shift+Alt+left/right work as they should once again. We have replaced the original change with another smaller one to make it possible for items that normally only snap to notes (such as dynamics) to be allowed to snap to barlines if the bar is otherwise empty, and that allows you to continue dragging dynamics through otherwise empty bars.
However, this does come at the expense of making it possible to drag dynamics with the mouse to grid positions. This was never really intended: on the whole it’s better for dynamics to be snapped to notes, and even if you want a change of dynamic within the duration of a sustained note, ideally you should indicate that position with a new notehead, so that it’s completely clear where the change of dynamic should occur.
We don’t currently have a way of choosing between snapping to notes and snapping to the grid when dragging with the mouse in the way we do for using the keyboard to make these edits. This is something we would like to allow in future.
Thanks for the detailed explanation behind the change – thought I was going crazy imagining it haha!
I will say the vast majority of the time, my use case for wanting to make a micro adjustment to hairpins on a whole note are in fact to un-attach it from the following bar, which it always does by default. The reason being quite often have to do with if I wish to insert a bar at that position, if attached it will stretch across the barline to come with which obviously you would not want, when writing swells for example.
There is no reason I would say using the mouse to do this over the keyboard is necessarily easier, it’s just comfortably intuitive to drag something where you want it to land.
Alternatively, you can invoke the caret and start the hairpin on the 4th beat using < and space to advance. Or even faster, select the second hairpin and ctrl+alt+N to duplicate it to the staff above.
Using the keyboard method, is there any way to move the position of a hairpin from its left side? There are times I have to adjust this, either it’s not lining up with the correct note or I remove a text dynamic and the hairpin gets offset so I would like to align it with the starting note.
With the mouse method, I was able to drag either side of the hairpin in the direction I needed. With the keyboard method, it appears it will only adjust the right side of a hairpin. So therefore either I have to first move the hairpin further left and then ‘trim’ the right, or simply delete the hairpin and start from scratch.
