I NEED a kind of "focus on flow" function!

Dorico
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Working with several choirs and arranging for them too. In one of my Choir projects I have 30 flows and I constantly have to go back to a flow and make some edits and print to my DropBox, so the new revision of the music is available.
This post is about this process, that I in contrary to many other features in Dorico,find is painfully slow!

Making the edits is straight forward - although Dorico insist on jumping to flow 1 all the time:
If I change layout, if I change zoom, if I switch between Page view and Galley view, but I kind of live with that - for now.

But the whole “export business” is a mess!
Let’s say, that I after some edits, need to export a layout - a choir score from a flow. Then I go to the Print page, select the choir layout from list to the left and then select the “Flows” button in the Print Range. Then I select the flow that I want. Ups I forgot that I also need to export the pno/choir layout from this flow, so I have to go all over the same commands again, select the choir/pno layout from the list to the left, click the Flows button, deselect all the flows and select the one I need.
So now the right flow are selected for both layouts, now to the naming:

I click on the Filename Options button and the dialog opens, with the name I used last time, so I need to change this to the right title, remembering that if I mistype I will end with 2 files instead of 1 updated file.

Now to the destination: Also here Dorico remembers the last path I selected, and that is kind of okay, because sometimes I will print directly to a dropbox other times to a local drive. And then I klick export and bang! that works.

Now to the audiofile creation for my choir! Here is the same scenario: Dorico doesn’t know which flow I’m working on so I have to select it, select file format - which is not remembered (!) - and finally the destination, where Dorico insist on creating a folder, Flows from “project name”, - which I don’t need, because I want Dorico to replace old audiofiles. So the I have to move the files OUT of the folder and delete the folder afterwards (!)
The naming process of the audiofiles would also benefit from some creative mind, because what I need is the sopran+pno, the alto+pno, tenor+pno, bass+pno, each on it’s own track, so the singers can learn their parts. I don’t know how that can be achieved, but the export dialog in Cubase 12 is excellent!
Yesterday I suddenly had a problem with a layout, and then I realized that there are NO link between the flow you are looking at in the Engrave page and the pages column to the right, other than the page number itself! And if you happens to have a project, where you DON’T want page numbers, but only page number within flow, you are kind of lost. Using the go to page function is not precise because you have several pages - depending on your screen size - and you have to guess which of the 3 pages is actually the one you want!
If there was a kind of “focus on flow” function a big part of this very time consuming and “accounting” work would be so much easier I think.
I imaging this scenario: With this function I wouldn’t have use the “Go to bar” function all the time because Dorico would know which flow I was working on. Maybe also the name of the flow, maybe the last file destination path for this flow, if it was saved separately and so on.

Let me emphasise, that I am a BIG fan of Dorico, I have been onboard from day one, been working as a music copyist for more than 20 years, know the “other two” VERY well, so this is not written to start a fight or discussion about ALL the fine things about Dorico, it’s ONLY because I really need these special - maybe not THAT special - features very much!

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This default behavior peeves me too. I’ve made a request that when you select the “flows” option, all the flows be deselected by default. One presumes that if you are selecting specific flows to export, you’ll not want them all selected when you open up the dialogue, otherwise you’d just export the whole layout.

One thing that can be helpful here and speed things up a bit is to deselect the flows you actually want, and then click the invert selection button. It’s faster than deselecting all and reselecting.

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Well selecting the right flow by Deselecting All flows and THEN selecting the right one, is 1 extra key, but my mission is to bring the “automation” quite a bit further.
Until now more than 100 persons has seen this post, not so many has reacted, I might be the only one - together with you?

1 Like
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I’ve kept this thread open in a tab for a little while and have read it a few times. It strikes me that what you are looking for here is a more centralised export function that would allow you to specify that you want to export PDFs and audio files of the same flow or flows, to specific locations, and then have everything you want exported with a single click.

Certainly in future we want to try to move towards a more standardised way of handling exporting, so that you the same flexibility of folder/filename locations you currently have with graphics export is available with flow, MIDI, audio, and MusicXML export. And perhaps it also makes sense for us to additionally allow graphics to be exported from those places too. This would, I think, provide a quicker way to export the same flow or flows in multiple formats.

For the actual editing of the project, however, it’s a bit trickier. I can’t quite see how we could “lock” things like note input, scrolling the score etc. to a single flow. But I will think about that as well.

3 Likes
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Nuendo has this for stem prints I think … can’t remember the exact feature name but its a dialog where you can export a set of tracks mix down into some format with settings, and you can set up as many variations as you wish (e.g. stereo, 7.1, etc). Buggy unfortunately in my experience, but seems like a similar idea. Here the input settings are Flows and Instruments and the outputs are formats and locations. Pretty much the same thing actually come to think of it.

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I don’t understand one (quite basic, I admit) thing:
If every flow needs to be exported to different locations, and there are multiple layouts (like piano+choir) that need to be reduced to specific single flows when printing – why is all this in one single file in the first place?
If they are so separate that they belong to different folders, then they should be kept in different locations in different files, making the whole process much easier.

Why throw all this together if you then have to split things up time and time again?

2 Likes
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I do a lot of musicals and I often need to make changes to one specific flow - song - , it could be another key, a cut, you know. But I also often need to make changes that affect all flows. Let’s say that an new performance want another orchestra where the Tenor Sax is replaced by a Clarinet (!) or I would like to implement a new font for all the lyrics in all flows.
In the first example it’s evident that I need to be able to “print” the specific flow, that has been altered. The resulting PDF will often be placed in a DropBox folder named by the flow. I will sometimes even have to create a new audio-file to help the singers.
So as you can see, Dorico’s “flow feature” is very handy - and the main reason why I have been using it from the first day. In my kind of work, where I have 30 to 40 flows - songs in a musical - it’s so much easier to edit overall things from staff-size in Piano/Conductor parts to a mispelling of the name of a character in the play. So I need the coherence Dorico offer, but also being able to “point” to a specific flow under some circumstances.