Mass Alt-arrow deleting notes?

Dorico
1

Hi all,

Can someone explain why Dorico is deleting the notes on beat 3 in this gif?

I decided I wanted to hear what this figure would sound like on the & of 1 instead of 2. If I select a single note and Alt-arrow back it moves it without any note deletions as expected. I figured it would be fastest to select everything I wanted moved, Alt-arrow back, then Alt-Shift-arrow forward to make it a dotted quarter. I was surprised that Dorico deleted the note on beat 3 in the previous bar when I used Alt-arrow with mass selected notes. There is a rest for the note to move into, so I’m not sure why the notes on beat 3 would need to be modified in any way.

I’m assuming this is a conceptual misunderstanding on my part rather than a bug, but anytime Dorico is deleting notes unexpectedly I really want to understand what is going on. I’m not sure why it doesn’t delete them for a single instance but does on a mass edit. Can anyone help explain what’s happening here and how to anticipate this in the future? Thanks!

2

Actually I think it probably is a bug, or at least an unintended consequence of something happening under certain circumstances and not in others. I’ll look into this some more.

3

FWIW it’s the same behaviour in Dorico 2.2.20

4

Thanks Daniel! I thought there might have been some concept I wasn’t grasping here.

5

Stefan, the developer who has handled most of the note input and editing code, got in touch with me this afternoon to say that he is aware of this issue, and that for the time being you will get better results when moving notes on multiple staves if you engage chord mode first, since this will avoid overwriting notes, instead merging them together as needed. Obviously in the specific case shown in Todd’s initial example there’s no need for any notes to be merged, but there you have it.

6

Interesting! I just tried it with chord mode on and it worked as expected. (Arrangement is done and I left that on beat 2 anyway.) Good to know to leave chord mode on when mass selecting from multiple locations.