Now that Dorico 6 is here, and has given us so many great new features in the area of notation (which is generally where my priorities lean), I thought I would offer a wish list of feature requests that still remain. I think at this point there isn’t much of anything that I frequently need and that Dorico cannot do, so all of these tend to be things that would speed up productivity significantly:
Ability to select notes across multiple staves for things like adding dynamics and articulations, and then be able to advance the selection across ALL of these staves at once. In concerted passages, this would save a good deal of time for adding all aspects of phrasing.
Ability to edit rests in condensed staves.
Ability to fully edit the appearance of multibar rests, especially to change the position of the number inside the staff globally.
Ability to move tuplet numbers inside the staff, always adjacent to the beams.
Clicking on any element in the properties panel automatically engages the property. For example, if I want “Partial beam direction”, I’d like to be able to simply click on the direction itself to turn on the property.
Easy way to deal with hiding rests appearing in multiple voices. Cleaning up rests on staves with multiple voices, especially rhythm section instruments, is very time consuming and tedious.
Some system by which we can control the appearance of doubling staves in galley view, either via a “track header” that allows selection of any current instrument held by a player, or perhaps a floating window (like the filter window) that allows dynamic engagement of doubling parts.
“Fixing” the way in which the current view jumps around based on selection. For example, if I select something, then scroll 100 measures past, then hit undo, the selection jumps back to the last selection. Ideally, it would be nice to limit this kind of sudden scrolling only to the use of the “P” shortcut, which is an extremely efficient way to jump to any current selection.
Ability to create custom dynamics, or at least replace the current list with alternatives. I NEVER use pppppp, but do use mfp and “m” alone frequently, and have had to replace some of these stock dynamics to get them—which means that the playback jumps from VERY soft to loud, etc., based on whatever dynamics I’ve replaced.
When selecting across multiple staves, hitting enter engages multi-staff note input. Sometimes, I am entering notes across staves, then have to exit note input mode to check something at the piano. The selection across staves remains, but when I hit enter, I have to then SHIFT-arrow to reengage multi-staff input.
Harmonics remain adjacent to noteheads regardless of other annotations.
Easy way to sync settings, templates, key commands across multiple devices. I work on a desktop at home and a laptop in my work office and it’s a mess trying to keep them both operating to the same setup. I’d love some kind of online/cloud based sync system.
These are not in order of any importance, just the things I keep coming across in my daily work. Thank you, Dorico team, for all of your hard work. I’m especially impressed with the new cutaway scores implementation, and though I have never felt a need for them they are so well developed that I think I might begin to use them now.
Can you explain this a bit more? Do you mean, say, selecting 2 bars wide and 4 systems deep, and moving the selection area forwards so that the next two 2 bars x 4 systems are now selected instead..?
You can do it in Engrave mode, but there’s no Engraving Option to do it globally, I’ll grant you. (Though I’m not convinced that it does anything for legibility.)
You can at least export and import all user settings from one computer to another. I can’t see Dorico managing cloud accounts for everyone.
Definitely +1 on this from me. The lack of ability to edit rest position is one of the biggest shortcomings of Condensing IMO. Whole rests are often positioned really poorly and there’s not much the user can do about it. (I seem to recall @johnkprice of course has a workaround, but if I’m remembering correctly it’s a bit time intensive to be practical on a large score.)
It’s fairly easy to do this today, if you’re already using a cloud storage provider to sync some folder tree on your computers.
Dorico’s config files are in c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 6 on Windows and Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 6 on Mac. (Or Dorico 5, for v5.) On your current machine, move this folder to somewhere under your cloud storage tree, and create some sort of folder link in the original location pointing to the new one, making sure that the link has the same name as the original folder. I use a junction on Windows, but I think a symlink should work just as well. A “shortcut” will not work.
On your second machine, verify that your cloud provider has synced the config folder. Now delete the config folder from Dorico’s default location and replace it with a link, as above.
I do this with config files/folders for many apps that I use and want to keep synchronized across machines.
One gotcha with Dorico is that when you run an installer to update to a newer version (like 5.1.70 to 5.1.80), the installer deletes your link and replaces it with an actual folder, with default settings, so you need to (on each machine) delete that folder and recreate your link to your synced folder. And of course, if you put this system in place while using v5 and then upgrade to v6, you’ll need to repeat it for the new v6 config folder, which is separate from the v5 config folder.
Bear in mind that if any of the file paths that Dorico stores in its settings – e.g. Auto-Save, Backup folder, Recent files, etc – are different, then you may end up with problems and unforeseen consequences.
Not quite. What I mean is selecting four systems deep, adding an articulation, then advancing all systems one note to the right to add another articulation, in this kind of situation:
I agree, generally, but it can save a lot of vertical space on a page when you have a lot of tuplets, plus dynamics, chord symbols, etc. I usually to prefer sacrificing the visibility in favor of real estate, especially when the tuplets are fairly obvious via context.
That’s what I do now, but then I think of a new thing to create a key command for, and then I have to resend everything, and then it happens again, etc.
I don’t know how to do this, but thanks for the suggestion. I’ll have to do some research.
This is one thing I just can’t get used to. I believe this is where the mysterious “Follow selection changes on undo and redo” setting can play a role but I have yet to fully figure out the logic behind it. Two simple examples:
Delete something in bar 10
Scroll to bar 100
Hit Undo
→ The view jumps back to bar 10 only when the Follow selection setting is checked. Which makes sense.
But:
Select something in bar 10
Scroll to bar 100
Alt+click to duplicate your selection to bar 100
Hit Undo
→ View jumps back to bar 10 no matter if the Follow selection setting is checked or not.
The reason this keeps biting me is because I fail too see why unchecking the Follow selection setting does work in example 1 but not in example 2. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
+1 for this one. Better yet, abandon the idea of a predefined list of dynamics (and therefore the need for ‘custom’ dynamics) and make the dynamic popover function like the tempo popover. All the glyphs are there. Invoke popover, type dynamic, enter. What a wonderful world this would be.
Out of curiosity what is the software limitation that prevents one from editing condensed staves, or the automatic post-divisi unison staves, in Write mode? Is it just that Dorico needs to recalculate condensing for the entire score every time music on a condensed staff is edited? If so I feel like this is already almost more of an inconvenience than a feature—loading Page View for a condensed score of any length can take a minute or more—and might be much more useful if it could be changed such that condensing would only be recalculated in Engrave mode (or something).
Another minor feature: still waiting on something like “Expression Text” so you can just write whatever you want there without having to add a hidden intensity marking—or the option to have multi-line Tempo markings, or even simply text both before and after a metronome mark. (And it would be really helpful, although I understand if less practical, if text objects could automatically wrap to a new line when they overrun the page margins.)
This doesn’t really work in practice though. For example if you have a string part divided into two sections where one is arco and the other pizzicato, and the subsequent unison is arco, you only want the arco playing technique displayed on the one staff where it should apply.
This does help, although the metronome mark only displays properly if the top line is longer than the bottom one, for whatever reason.
Many of us have adopted the habit of keeping two windows open of the same document, for instance one in write mode scroll view, and one in engrave mode. Then you won’t have to wait when switching.
In that case any action (entering a note, selecting an object, etc) takes 20-30 seconds minimum. More involved actions like splitting a flow could take several minutes. I have 16GB of RAM on a 2019 iMac with a Radeon Pro 555X 2GB, so it would be more or less impossible to work with page view open in any window unless I turned condensing off.
What size document is this? I wouldn’t expect this unless you’re working on very lengthy, full orchestral works.
Do you have a mechanical hard drive in this iMac (either on its own or as a Fusion drive)…?
The average lifespan of mechanical hard drives (HDDs) is typically 3 to 5 years, so you should be looking to replace the original drive, ideally with an SSD.
