Is it hard to give us more control behind the scenes on the Play interface while you work out technical details on various improvements and fixes on the Write and Engrave?
If I could do more DAW like stuff in the Play area, I could work with it as it is until such a day.
[random question} Did you ever consider building the interface over your actual DAW as another option – yes, I would suppose you could charge twice as much – but worth it IMO for those who want to pay for it.) From what I understand it has partial interface anyway. (don’t own Cubase, so don’t know much about it)
As a person totally unrelated to development I can confidently answer this question:
Yes it is very hard. Development is hard, and takes time and lots of resources.
But there is hope! They already are working on it!
So do not despair, in due time we will get our sweet Play functions.
I think Nikola has summed it up well - software development is hard. The thing that may not be apparent is that unlike a sequencer, Dorico doesn’t actually store any MIDI at all. What you see in the Play Mode has to be generated from the notation and then any edits have to keep the MIDI-like and notation representation in sync. So there’s a huge amount of work that has to go into making anything in Play Mode visible or editable. It’s not simple to let you have more control, though we really want to greatly increase the amount you can do in Play Mode over time. It will never be a proper DAW, but we expect it will borrow from the DAW functionality you expect, where that makes sense (creating notes, drag/drop, automation lanes, etc).
Building a notation layer over the top of a DAW wasn’t an option because first and foremost Dorico is for music notation, and that is the representation that is the 1st order citizen in our data model. However, the audio engine is basically a very stripped down version of Cubase, and effectively Dorico constructs tracks of MIDI data as you would in Cubase, and feeds that to the engine. However, there is a lot of complexity in that translation layer.
I have things normally assigned to string instruments (like pizzicato) assigned brass, for instance trombone. Because I have 20 variations of trombone articulation. It’s the only way I know to use them. And Dorico recognizes the command or pizz.
String instruments are even worse. There is so much I can’t use.
I would be happy if you had Natural 1, Natural 2, etc. instead of just Natural, that could be assigned an articulation. Is that hard?
Unfortunately this is something that isn’t possible at the moment. We do want to greatly improve the use of playing techniques for playback, and the support for 3rd party libraries, but there’s a lot of work involved in that, and we only have a small team.