Hi all! I do love Dorico - huge congrats to all involved. Like everything theres positive and negative, but the fact the team are constantly listening and changing his totally great.
My biggest gripe is this: The “flows” way of working just doesn’t suit me! ( And I suspect many others) I just dont write/arrange much music that would ever have different movements- my most often used scenario for Dorico is band parts, small/ large pit bands, songs, sometime piano and vocal, sometimes with orchestral accompaniment.
But these are all really stand alone projects…
For example- I want to write a title at the top of my piece, and then that title appears on all the parts and the headers etc… this is so convoluted in Dorico…every project I have to go into parts and name them, delete “flow 1”…or maybe I’m missing something??
would be great if there was a way of just saying “this is a stand alone project, not part of a bigger thing”!
Thanks for the help in advance!
It should be as simple as going to Library>Layout Options>Page Setup>Flows… and setting show flow headings to never.
If you create a new project from within the ‘Steinberg Hub’ (the opening screen listing your recent projects), you can specify if your new project will have multiple flows or not: it’s a checkbox labelled ‘Project will use several flows’ (in the English version) on the right. Several layout options will be adjusted to accommodate this choice. But you can always change them later on, as described above.
(I forgot that - probably because I’ve never had cause to use it)
There are many other cases where flows are quite handy. One simple case is as a scratchpad. There are times when I’m not sure I am going to like a particular orchestration idea. I might duplicate my main flow and do some experimentation on the second flow until I am sure I want to keep those ideas. You could do the same thing with separate file versions, but sometimes it is nice to have all the music open in front of you.
Sometimes we are not sure what key is going to work best for the singer. I might create a separate flow for each transposition, because each key might force some changes in the voicing.
I have had some pieces where I write alternate endings. This can all be done within the main flow, of course, but I find the formatting defaults actually work out well if the alternate ending is a separate flow.
I have written some medleys. Again, that can be done in a single flow, but the formatting of multiple flows actually worked out nicely to put each section into its own flow.
… and then click “Set As Default”. You’ll need to do this for both a Part layout and a Score layout. Then it’s done.
And for existing projects, you can select several part layouts at once (in the right-hand panel of Layout Options), and change the setting for all of them.
You’re definitely missing something, as you should be able to use the Project Title in the Project Info dialog, and have this appear in every layout automatically.
actually on this question of “show flow settings”, I discovered in my latest project that the setting had been changed to “never” which is not the default and one I virtually never want. It seems that if you create a project from scratch then the default is for only one flow but I’m not aware this changes the “show flow settings” status? This happened at least once before and it’s not a setting I have ever consciously changed manually.
How are you going about setting up your project “from scratch”. I ask as, if you’re going through any of the templates in the hub, you’ll find that the “project contains multiple flows” option in the right side may be unticked.
Create new–> Empty. As I just said, the default is for only one flow (multiple flows unticked) so the question remains – does this selection mean that the Library>Layout Options>Page Setup>Flows setting is changed? If I test by changing setting to factory defaults, it still shows “show headings for all flows” so it would seem not. Hence the confusion!
Well it could be that you’ve saved it as a default, of course.
of course you may be right there, albeit not intentionally. But I thought “factory settings” were just that?
Factory settings are factory settings. Reset to saved defaults resets to, er, saved defaults.
If you create a new project, unless it’s from a template that overrides particular settings (e.g. a Solo template that won’t show staff labels even in the score layout), the project will use your saved defaults, not the factory settings. Even with a template that overrides particular settings, it only overrides particular settings and should leave all the other ones as the saved defaults.
exactly. I tried restoring factory settings, not saved defaults (which were anyway greyed out suggesting to me I had never saved them)
I’ve read back over the thread, and I see that the only Create New > Empty is in the hub. (On the File menu, it would just be File > New…)
So again - apologies for not answering the question more clearly above - it’s almost definitely down to this tickbox:
That tickbox does indeed change the visibility of Flow Headings in Layout Options, just for that project.
Next time I’m in the UK, I’d like to take a tour of the factory.
I believe the servers are in Hamburg…
right – thanks for that and was indeed what I was beginning to suspect.