MIDI note playing logic when selecting notes

Dorico
1

Turn up your speaker. Type a sequence of notes in Write mode, then make sure they are not selected. Now press and hold command (Mac) and start selecting one note after the other, RIGHT TO LEFT (i.e., starting with the note on the right and then selecting notes further to the left). Each time you select an additional note, you hear the newly selected note from your MIDI player, as you should.

But if you clear the selection and start selecting LEFT to RIGHT instead, the newly selected notes are no longer played, which is a bug.

Note this problem only occurs when selecting notes within the same voice.

2

I can’t reproduce this, Matthias. Notes are auditioned regardless of the direction in which they’re selected. You’re talking about hopping the selection from the start of one bar to the next, using Command+left/right, yes? That works as expected in both directions.

3

No, I press and hold Command (Mac) and then keep clicking on the note heads one by one. This is what I do when I need to apply an action to multiple notes that are not next to each other.

4

Thanks for the clarification. For what it’s worth, this behaviour is as designed, at least for now: Dorico doesn’t actually track the selection changes, so it instead compares the old selection state to the new selection state after each change, and decides whether to audition the selection based on a number of rules. One of those rules concerns whether the first note in the selection has changed, in which case we don’t audition.

When you add to the selection right to left, the first (i.e. earliest) note changes, so the selection is auditioned; however, when you add left to right, the first note doesn’t change, so the selection is not auditioned. (This is because we don’t want the first note to sound repeatedly when e.g. extending the selection with Shift+right arrow.)

It’s possible we may refine this in future, but it’s not currently a high priority.

1 Like
5

Thanks for your quick response. A refinement would certainly make sense; to me, it seems if one clicks on anything to add to a selection, that element should be played.

Thanks for all your awesome work!