Sounds promising.
I don’t see any reference to being able to backup/import custom tonality systems. Is this a thing?
As far as I know you can’t import or save tonality systems. As a workaround I’m using Save As… to save my file as a new score, then delete the music, add instruments, etc.
You can’t import/export tonality systems, but you can click ‘Save as Default’ in the Edit Tonality System dialog to make that tonality system available in every project you start in future.
Daniel, when you “save as default”, does it still make the standard (12 & 24 EDO) tonality systems available, or will those need to be manually re-added?
Those will still be available in new projects as well.
Ah, that’s good to know. Just as a thought: the “save as default” combined with separate score files for different tonality systems may allow for tonality systems to be shared: just have a bunch of files with different tonality systems, open one of them, do the “save as default” and then other new scores will have that system available.
Still, that would be a feature request, I suppose: implement more formal import/export of tonality systems so that more than 12ET, 24ET and one custom one (that has already been created) can be referenced in a score if needed.
It’s tempting to think about some other things like separating the written notes on a staff from the scale period, where the scale pattern repeats (to get playback of non-perfect-octave temperaments or to change how many notes are represented by staffs) but in terms of just getting microtonal notation, there aren’t too many reasons I can think of why that would be all that useful. Dorico’s system seems pretty good.
Also: along the same lines, I request a feature request in the same vein for chord symbols: in addition to the “save as default” be able to import and export custom chord symbol info. Microtonal chord symbols aren’t as well-known as accidentals, but they are out there.
This seems like the sort of thing where a macro facility would give a pretty good solution, in the situation where there are probably as many different use cases as there are people wanting to make heavy use of microtones.
If you could record the process of creating a tonality system, save the macro file, and replay it into a new project (presumably, at very high speed compared with doing the operations manually) everyone could then organize their own preferred way of having a “library” of components to build the score from.
A comment above is one of the few I’ve seen referring to multiple accidentals on one note. For an advanced just intonation score, that is pretty much essential—because creating combination glyphs means 100 or 200 of them in some cases, there being theoretically no enharmonically equivalent notes where the prime numbers don’t mix. Even if there are practical equivalents (especially in the 12,000 EDO possibility), notating equivalents won’t likely make sense.
The old notation program Lime supported multiple accidentals. It doesn’t seem like a difficult concept: you add/subtract the pitch offsets for each accidental. That is my big request, which I hope makes good sense to Steinberg.
Meanwhile, Dorico has enabled me to write (and hear) music in EDOs that I’ve been unable to produce for quite a while.
@dspreadbury , any chance Pitch Bend messages will be added to Expression Maps in v4.1? This would help at least some of us (for microtonal accidentals attached to the notes, and for detuning of winds).
Paolo