Just upgraded from 3.5 - Criticisms

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:

  • 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.

  • 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:
    Scroll
    However, I am able to grab the zoom with the mouse and bring it down to:
    Scroll2
    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.

  • 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:

  • I miss the arrows to close the side panels (trivial)

  • Some of the menus (e.g. Write) overpopulate to the right and above, blocking access to the others (trivial, albeit annoying).

  • 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.

  • 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.

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Sorry for not responding to this post sooner. Would you please do Help > Create Diagnostic Report and attach the resulting zip file here so I can take a look at the crash dumps to see why the application is crashing when you do Ctrl+A?

I’d also be interested to see the project in which you find the application freezes when you do Ctrl+A.

I imagine the diagnostics may be too large to attach here if they contain multiple crash dumps; in which case, please feel free to send them to me via email at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de.

No worries, I know you have your hands full! Report attached.
It wasn’t that easy to crash it, it’s mostly an issue that it becomes unresponsive/frozen, if you lose your patience and start clicking it will turn white and get the Windows message saying “this program is blah, blah, blah…”.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.7 MB)

There aren’t any crash logs in that zip file, unfortunately, Claude. If you have a project that reliably reproduces the problem, please send it to me (by direct message if you prefer) including the steps needed to cause the freeze to occur.

My bad. Let me see if I have the procedure correctly: I crash the program, then I reopen Dorico and on the Hub window I click create diagnositc(?). Is this right or do I have to first open the project that crashed?

Using the same project, if I ‘Select All’ in 3.5 Dorico takes but a second to react, in 4.0.31 it hangs for nearly a minute and it will often freeze. It does however recover 9 out 10, but this really makes the program very slow to use.

For what it’s worth, you’re not the only person finding Select All to be slow:

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