Marquee tool and Note Selection (issues/suggestions)

Hello, first time Dorico user here. I tried searching for solutions before resorting to posting, but haven’t found any for these issues.

  1. When I try to make a large selection with the Marquee Tool, the selection does not scroll when I hold-drag beyond the visible window. In other words, I can only select things within the confines of the visible window. This seems like a basic feature that’s missing. Is there a way to make the Marquee Tool work the way I want? (Note: Yes, I can zoom out to be able to select more, but only to an extent. I’ll be working with long/large scores so it’d be great for the Marquee Tool to select and scroll beyond the visible area.)

  2. When I want to select specific notes in chords, the selection is erratic. Sometimes it selects the one note, sometimes the whole chord. When I use the arrow up-down keys to go from chord selection to a single note, sometimes it selects one note in the chord (good), but sometimes it jumps to another staff (not good). Things get more weird when there are multiple voices (notes get selected across different voices even as I’m trying to select one note).

Yes, I realize I can zoom in large to make the selection more reliable, but since I’m working with large scores where I’d like to see a good portion of the score, to have to zoom every time I want to select a single note is a drag.

Possible suggestion: Clicking on a note always selects that specific note. Double clicking a note selects the whole chord.

Thanks everyone for your help.

The answer is probably “don’t use the marquee selection tool for what you are trying to do”.

A more reliable way is to click and shift-click to select everything between the two objects you clicked on (the two objects can be on different staves), and then use the Filter commands (in the Edit menu) to restrict the selection if you need to. You can scroll the score between making the first and second clicks. There is also a “select more” option in the Edit menu which extends a selection to more objects of the same type (notes, dynamics, whatever), and using it repeatedly expands the range of selection up to the whole flow. You can assign keyboard shortcuts to all these functions - some of them already have “standard” shortcuts.

Read the Release Notes PDF for more details. Some of these are new features, and I’m not sure if they are in the documentation website yet.

Re your suggestion, a single click on a note STEM selects the whole chord, and a single click on a BEAM selects the whole beam group. In Dorico 2.2 double clicking either edits the object if it can be created by a popover, starts note-entry mode, or switches from Engrave mode to Write mode to let you edit things which you can’t change in Engrave mode.

Thanks alot for your quick reply; much appreciated!

  1. Yes, it looks like for the moment, clicking on objects and using filters seems to be the only way to select large areas without the Marquee Tool.

  2. That’s great to know that clicking stems selects the whole chord (and beams, the whole group of notes on a beam). However, my question still remains, is there any way to reliably click on a SINGLE note without it selecting the whole chord some of the time (which then forces me to use the arrow keys which will sometimes correctly go to single notes and sometimes jump to other staves.

If clicking stems is the way select a chord, then I don’t see why it’s necessary that clicking on specific notes will sometimes select single notes and sometimes the whole chord. It would be great if the reliability of selecting single notes could be improved in future updates.

The zoom function (Z for in, X for out) is quite handy, and I’m constantly changing the scale of my viewing window, depending on whether I want a big-picture shot, or fine-grain control. Press Z twice, and you’ll find things easy to select.

If clicking stems is the way select a chord, then I don’t see why it’s necessary that clicking on specific notes will sometimes select single notes and sometimes the whole chord. It would be great if the reliability of selecting single notes could be improved in future updates.

The selection behavior is consistent, it’s just that if you’re zoomed out enough, it’s difficult to differentiate between clicking the notehead and clicking the stem (that is, the place where the notehead touches the stem.

Pro tip: to select 5 out of the 6 notes in a bar, click on an empty spot in the bar to select everything, then shift-click to de-select the one note you don’t want. There are numerous situations where I use some iteration of this behavior.

Hi JM welcome to the forum. There’s another way to select portions of music or symbols, select more, Command|Shift|A. If you select a bar (by clicking in an empty part of the bar), you can then Command|Shift|A to select everything on that system. Pressing Command|Shift|A a second time will select that whole line in the entire flow. It will not work if you select an empty bar or a rest.

However, it works differently if you select a note in a particular voice, or if you choose a dynamic or a playing technique. Command|Shift|A will select more of that voice or more of that dynamic or playing technique. It’s pretty cool!

This is a great community. Thank you Rob, Dankreider, and David for your pro tips. The “select all notes except”, the Z/X zoom, and the Command|Shift|A “select more” tips are really useful.

So to address this point you made, Dankreider,

The selection behavior is consistent, it’s just that if you’re zoomed out enough, it’s difficult to differentiate between clicking the notehead and clicking the stem (that is, the place where the notehead touches the stem.

I so wish this were true, but I’m afraid it isn’t so. I’ve attached a zip of a quick mp4 clip that shows me struggling to select a specific inner note of a chord at 150% zoom (I think that’s a reasonably large zoom). I try putting the arrow on different parts of the note and clicking, being careful not to touch the stem, and you’ll see that I’m unsuccessful. The video is a nail-biting thriller, and well worth a watch!

Based on this, I think the fact remains that the detection mechanism could be improved…

Side question: what types of video attachments can I include on this forum? This forum won’t accept mp4 attachments, so I had to zip it.

Thank you all for your help. It’s really fun to get into this.
Me Trying to Click Single Note 1.zip (34.3 KB)

Other than images, which must be less than 700 pixels wide, the only other file type that can be attached is a zip file. Nobody’s really thrilled about that, but we’ve all gotten used to it!

I generally host files elsewhere, like dropbox, and just post a link.

I am on the road so I can’t look at the video you posted at the moment. I will say that I occasionally experience a little frustration in selecting notes as you were describing, but I’ve gotten used to it. I generally zoom in a good bit more than 150%, since it’s so easy to do. Also, I click on the outside edge of the notehead, not the center.

I agree it’s hard to nail that at 150% zoom, but at 200% I probably succeed better than 9 times of 10.

Zoom-in, zoom-in, click, zoom-out, zoom-out (using the shortcut keys) is a lot faster than several failed attempts without zooming.

Well, you guys have pretty much solved my problem.

After repeating the Z-Z-Click-X-X combination for a whole session today, and aiming on edges of notes away from the stem (instead of center), things have become speedy and reliable.

Thanks guys for your support; this was a great experience.

LOL what a frustrating video that was to watch! This is what I do when that happens . . . once you’ve selected a chord or couple of notes in a chord I use the up and down arrow keys to select the one note I want. But increasing the zoom works too.

LOL what a frustrating video that was to watch! This is what I do when that happens . . .

Well, I think this is not funny and Dorico should help us users here. I’m getting frustrated by zooming in too 300% and then back to the original view, just to select one note and also the deselecting or up and down key thing isn’t my dream solution. I pretend that in 90% of the case if we users click on a note, we don’t want a second note to be selected. So the normal behavior should be to select one note and not two. This is one of the things we useres use a lot and it should be smooth and handy without any tricks and fidling around. So we should stop to blandish and ask the Dorico people for a better behavior in this issue.

I appreciate you guys watching the clip and sharing your thoughts. Indeed, workarounds are vastly helpful (thank you David26), but given Dorico’s responsiveness to users and its forward looking development team, one can reasonably hope that the note selection feature could be improved.

So, to echo your sentiments, J_Woodtli, hopefully this thread will come to attention of those who might implement an update. An excellent product can always be better!

I may be new to all this, but I really want Dorico to be the best, for practical and personal reasons…

All threads come to the attention of the Development Team; they are very attentive.