An observation: Sibelius has a ton of rules under the hood. Dorico has way more, of course, but Dorico wears the rules on its sleeve and makes it harder for you to manually interfere locally. After a few months of using Dorico, I went back to Sibelius to fix up an old project, and, for the first time, I thought to myself “Ah. All of these chord symbols need to be 2mm closer to the stave. I bet I could adjust the Chord Symbols text style so that they’re positioned better”, and sure enough, I could. For years I’d been filtering chord symbols and shifting them manually (for a whole score in one go, but nevertheless!). There’s a full-time engraver that often livestreams his Sibelius sessions on Facebook, in the Music Engraving Tips group. On seeing him manually adjusting a heap of dynamics, I commented that if he changed one rule, 95% of the manual fiddling would be unnecessary. His response? “Oh, well this is how I’ve always done it”.
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump,
bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind
Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only
way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that
there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping
for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that
perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom,
and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.
I guess the person who wrote that never used the really powerful formatting options in Lilypond, because when they are switched on, editing bar 300 not only reformats bars 301 to the end, but also completely reformats bars 1-299 if doing that gets closer to the “engraving rules” you specified.
For example if you are making a collection of short pieces, it might decide that re-spacing one piece to fit on 6 systems will work better than 5, and completely change the page layout of almost every page of the project…
Of course Lilypond was one of the “products A B and C” in Daniel’s early blogs on the design of Dorico. And quite a few features of Lilypond that weren’t in either Sibelius or Finale have turned up in Dorico, so it’s slightly amusing that a Lilypond user doesn’t feel at home…
Heh, indeed. I was thinking about that, but I thought it wasn’t positive enough to post in this thread. (That, and because sometimes I wish we could tell Dorico to compile, instead of doing everything on the fly, which would derail my whole point.) I’m definitely with you, but I can understand that different people get different things out of the software, and a little give and take is important.
I’ve said it before: it will be a pain in the behind until Dorico implements most features we need, but that pain, coming from Dorico’s insistence in having everything conceptually tidy, is mostly worth it. I waste a huge amount of time just fixing someone else’s screw-ups when I don’t control a project through and through. Receiving a file from a composer or editor is always a nerve-wracking experience, because, despite never knowing what will come up, one thing I do know beforehand is the deadline — and that it won’t budge no matter what. It seems to me that most of the time people feel friction when coming to Dorico is because they were doing something wrong before. And if you can’t convince a programmer that it is important to keep a tidy data structure, I don’t know who else I’ll be able to convince.
That being said, that does not concern the poster’s problems, I think, which are rather easy to turn over, and I believe that he’ll feel much better afterwards.
It is a funny thing; we’ve all been frustrated with Dorico at some point or another. I particularly remember being absolutely incensed one time when I couldn’t remember where a setting was… is it in layout options? nope. engraving options? nope. notation options? I didn’t see it. Time to check engraving options again… WHERE ON EARTH IS THIS SETTING?! As “conceptually tidy” as Dorico is, even the dev team have admitted once or twice that there are a few things that could be argued for one place or another.
The moral of the story: even those of us who wax most poetic about Dorico have been frustrated as we learned the program. The silver lining is the fact that once you wrap your head around it, it is marvelously fun to use!
This is not a joke, and I’m not sure it’s a challenge. But I’m having a hard-to-please friend over this weekend, and he’s after the absolute minimum number of steps to change bar 1 in the top staff to be like bar 1 in the bottom staff. Bar two must remain untouched at all times. Anyone? (no prizes will be awarded, but Steinberg MAY get a new customer…)
and now we wanted to change bar 1 into 9/8 needing to add two 16th notes at the end. So, we
added a “cautionary” 4/4 time signature to bar 2
added a 9/8 TS to bar 1
selected the last note in bar 1 and did shift-B “1/8” which gives an 8th rest before the note and 9 real 8th beats in this bar (something that the TS does not do on its own)
with the last note still selected did alt-leftarrow (twice, given a 16th grid setting)
placed the caret at the last 8th, select 16th notes and entered the two remaining pitches
Is there are smarter way? (hopefully someone finds these spelled out procedures helpful…)
And also, both seem to be computer engineers/programmers and might be overthinking technical things too much, and are therefore confused because Dorico does things very differently (as it also is a much more modern program).
Different people have different frames of mind. One of the two seemed to get into a state where “OMG I can’t play back a trill, help,I can’t write anything at all because of that, this software is useless.”
On the other hand, for most of the first year I had Dorico I didn’t even have playback switched on at all, since it was too clunky and unresponsive to bother with!
