So as the tile says, I just upgraded from 3.5 to 4.0.31 and spent several hours exploring and watching lovely Anthony’s videos. I have to say I am pretty much speechless! The jump bar alone is revolutionary! I can’t believe how much the program has improved and every single addition is so well thought out, I am flabbergasted! They’ve packed so much in it’s silly…
Now for the downside (obviously). I have very quickly found several breaking bugs:
Visual issues:
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First was the VE Pro link window. It showed up halfway above the monitor and couldn’t close it. This was solved by opening Dorico in my portrait monitor, where I could reach it and move it down.
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Then if I want to add a controller (for example CC7 below) in Play mode it’s below the screen and can’t access it:
The workaround is to resize Dorico’s window and then you can. -
The mouse wheel scroll (CTRL+MW) refuses to go any further than this:
However, I am able to grab the zoom with the mouse and bring it down to:
This is also true the other way, but not as much. -
Add automation scroll (in Write Mode) is insanely oversensitive. If press the + Add Automation I can see only the first choice (CC 0-7), if I move the mouse wheel just one notch it jumps to CC 24-31. Again the workaround is just to resize Dorico’s window and make it small enough so you can see all options.
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Several of the new icons on top don’t have any hover-on information. Despite watching all of Anthony’s videos I have no idea what they do. Same is true of the editor windows, but they’re a bit more obvious.
Freezing bugs:
If I press CTR+A, which was something I was doing regularly in 3.5. Dorico will just freeze and be careful with clicking with your mouse or pressing anything till it’s done, because it will crash. This is a relatively humble Flow of 100 bars and 6 instruments.
If followed from above I press J, then Dorico will freeze for a long time and Windows will tell me it stopped responding. Again, if one is patient it will eventually recover, if you press anything it will crash.
Very minor issues:
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I miss the arrows to close the side panels (trivial)
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Some of the menus (e.g. Write) overpopulate to the right and above, blocking access to the others (trivial, albeit annoying).
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I’ll miss the vertical space provided by the Play window. It would be wonderful if we could just have two open windows linked, so in one I click on the score and the other one Play mode jumps to the location and/or like the old days when one clicked on a note and then changed to Play mode and it was in the right place. Although I suppose this now works with CTR+8.
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I really like that the way the editor windows resizes automatically i.e. between the Piano Roll and the controller/velocity lanes, However, it would be very useful if we could just set our own custom view, which Dorico would save with the project or as a default view.
That’s it for now, I absolutely love it and now I can definitely recommend this program to absolutely everyone! The jump bar just makes it absolutely old-geezer-proof, thank you so much for the Right-Click tools and hope you can fix that zoom issue soon. Looking forward to further improvements, although as it stands it’s almost perfect!
PD: minor request, could we have a higher resolution than demisemiquaver for the grid? Currently it’s just not enough.