Molto cresc. "molto" not showing

Why am I not able to type “molto cresc” into dynamics pop-up? it only brings up cresc. and I’m having to click on molto manually.

Yes, that’s not very good, I will freely admit. The parser used by the Shift+D popover is not perfect! I will talk to my colleagues in the team about this after the holidays.

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In Finale, one can create an expression of one’s own devising, assign it a playback style and a key stroke and insert it as needed with one stroke. Is this possible in Dorico? And if not, why not?

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For that you can use a playing technique, which you can use for whatever playback technique you want. I don’t think you can assign it a single shortcut, but you can customise how will appear in the popover, so your shortcut would be Shift+P+(whatever you choose).

Yes. Read the manual! The keystroke is shift-P. But be aware, Dorico treats dynamics as a special case. If that’s a showstopper for you, go back to Finale and be content.

Thanks, lucas and Janus. I don’t have Dorico but I am planning to buy Dorico 4. I’m just inquiring about different things to see if Dorico will fit my needs.
In this case, I don’t want to type in an expression every time I need it.

So you are saying that it is possible in Dorico to build up a library of custom expressions, dynamics, ornaments etc. (I must have hundreds) that one has created previously and insert each one with a different keystroke? The OP had me wondering why he didn’t do that with molto cresc.

Not currently within Dorico itself (and as to why: well, Finale’s developers have had the luxury of a 20+ year head start).

It’s a matter of a minute’s work to add a custom keyboard shortcut into the keycommands file as has been explained many times in these forums, e.g. Dorico 3 - Keyboard shortcuts for microtonal accidentals? - #5 by pianoleo

Well, Finale has always organized markings in libraries, since the beginning, so that’s not a matter of development time but design.

But I might argue that Dorico’s popovers and “Save As Default” make entering markings overall easier, quicker and more accurate than Finale’s libraries. And if you don’t like typing text, you can still choose common markings from panels, which are much better organized than the scrolling collections of markings (some randomly ordered) one finds in a Finale document.

Expecting Dorico to work the same way as Finale is a hopeless proposition. Finale certainly introduced some brilliant and fairly comprehensive ways of copying music in 1988. But in the following quarter century we had time to think about better methods, and Dorico presents some of those.

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In any case, with a stramdeck you don’t need to type any text.
You program everything in advance and just press the button, so the keyboard shortcuts can be multiplied by 100

Thank you all for your responses. Time will tell if Dorico’s system will allow for the degree of customization and ease of input that I need. I am dubious, but plan to buy the program anyway, if only to keep up with its development and support a worthy cause.

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