The Dorico transpose panel is exceedingly confusing. I’ve been a Dorico user for many years, and every time I go to transpose, I find the order of choices illogical at best, maddening (dare I say “stupid?” No, that’s insulting and not what I want to convey) always. Long and short, I can’t get myself to think in the order of the available choices.
Why quality before interval? That makes no sense. I can’t choose the quality until I choose the interval, as some qualities are not available for all intervals. “Perfect 2nd,” for example. And if I’ve marked a quality early in a working session and want to switch to a “number of divisions,” the quality locks me into a choice I may not want.
I could complain further, but the entire panel needs total rethinking in my view.
Yes, indeed. That’s been a peeve of mine since transitioning to Dorico. Someone just wasn’t thinking clearly when ordering selections on the popup window. A simple reverse in order the next time there’s an update probably should not be a big deal since the interval changes the qualities available anyway. It should be as simple as graphically switching locations on a form…well, that’s my perspective for what it’s worth…
@Derrek, you actually mentioned that the order was illogical in a thread. And yes @Janus, there have been different times since at least 2021 that this issue has been brought up. Interestingly, not once, that I can find, did anyone from the Steinberg team comment one way or another as to whether it was of interest to them to correct.
That’s at least five (5) years of ignoring a repetitive customer complaint (admittedly, a minor issue) that should be a relatively easy fix that is just the right thing to do for future users of Dorico if for no other reason.The rest of us already know that popup window does not follow logical order. Of course, whether it’s an easy fix or not, we will never know because the development team does not appear to be interested in interacting about this.
Just making an observation…and not trying to start a coup or anything.
@asherber I get it. Yet, as I recall from the only OOP work that I did with visual basic way back when, most development environments use a modifiable form for input windows that the coder has almost complete control over. I’ve found that to be true with Xcode on my Mac as well using C. Fields, as in the case of Quality and Interval on this particular form, can usually be fairly easily reordered along with the associated tab stops.
In deference to developer fairies, I killed mine long, long ago and had a beautiful Requiem Mass for them. It would have been more beautiful had Cantai been around back then. I found those little critters, though, to often be more pesky than helpful…kinda like a sprite…(teasing, of course). Nevertheless, I’ve had my say and will leave it at that unless someone else chooses to subtly chastise my written word. Pease and blessings to you and all of our forum folks!
The inablility to automatically wrap transpositions seems like a deficiency too. Transposition into remote keys should certainly be a possibility, but 98% of the time (completely made up stat) people will want the transposition to reflect the most accessible key, so why not default to that, and leave more remote options as an additional feature?
An idle guess as to an answer: perhaps the order decision was simply linguistically driven, since in English adjectives come before nouns — and in this specific case, interval types/qualities before numbers.
I won’t go so far as to agree on the label “illogical” used by some (since language patterns are logical), but it does seem to be an instance where other logic should prevail.
Just adding a +1 to switching the order of choices with “Interval” being above “Quality”. I regularly find myself attempting to select an interval, and then finding that I need to choose “quality” before I can choose the desired interval. Reversing the order would eliminate this annoyance.
it has been posited that it is not an easy fix although none of the usual Steinberg folks have commented one way or another. I find that a bit odd. Something’s amiss…
If it were, wouldn’t it make more sense to put the Up/Down designation first? That’s how I usually encounter it anyway. At a rehearsal a vocalist might say, “this is a little low for me, so let’s try it up …” or “I have a cold today, so let’s do this down …”
In Finale’s basic Transpose dialog, they have the direction first:
Quality above Interval bugs me more, but if this window ever does get redesigned, putting the Direction at the top makes more sense to me as whether you need to go up or down seems like the first decision to be made.
This is a condition I always had with the Make Music (Finale) “team” for the 15 years I was associated with them. The both before Boulder and the after Boulder.
Being a lay person with little programing or coding experience (I did do some C+ in the last century) you never know if what you ask for is even possible or how much work (money) it would be to implement it.
I try to avoid the ‘Transpose’ feature if I can but I do make it work as I suspect all of you do.
