Most important feature requests for Dorico 4

My money’s on a unique collaboration with Yamaha Disklavier, enabling Disklaviers to play back Dorico projects natively :smiling_imp:

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I find myself in a similar situation whenever I import a MIDI file into Dorico I get weird stimming issues with the staves and even when I try to turn that feature off it’s still there… additionally, imported MIDI files are time-consuming and ARE BEYOND FRUSTRATING mainly because of how Dorico transcribes that information into something that is legible or comprehensible as well as being visibly configurable in terms of how it voices and quantizes MIDI data. I hate to say this, but I always have to prep a file in Sibelius and then import that xml file into Dorico Pro to actually be readable… it’s just too much back and forth of different things when you want Dorico to be your One-Stop shop… and that’s not to mention that weird little grayed out thing above each measure… that’s just psychologically maddening when you’re trying to edit a passage quickly and you have multiple staves stacked all around each other on an orchestral score… it makes Dorico time-consuming in a bad way when what you really want is something that is intuitive to your needs… for instance take the bread and butter of Dorico, which I find to be the engraving feature that allows you to create professional-looking score… But… there’s this arcane rigidity that it employs to make a score look decent… Whereas in Sibelius you can really customize the look of a score into something totally unique simply by clicking and dragging the placement of where you want your staff to be… in Dorico this simple little thing can become like astrophysics… don’t get me wrong I really like Dorico and what it could be, but for the almost $600 I paid for Dorico I would like to compose the music I want, not the other way around… the software imposes a lot of strictures that are time consuming or archaic… Dorico composes the music it wants not what I want… the software really needs to be fine-tuned and be made more intuitive…

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A. Have you tried Dorico’s requantise function?
B. Are you aware that Alt-T toggles the System Track on/off?

Actually yes to all of those things… and sadly the issues still remain…

If you turn off the “weird little greyed out thing” using Alt-T, how can the issue still remain?

I’m intending to be helpful, not argumentative. But saying “the software needs to be fine-tuned” is rather meaningless. “Intuitive” is a matter of opinion, and the term has become so overused that it’s somewhat of a joke on this forum. Ask a specific question about a specific problem, and you’ll get a specific solution!

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To take your example of staff spacing, for instance, it’s entirely possible to assign shortcuts to the tools in the left panel of Engrave mode. I have them on a modifier key plus the numpad keys 1-5. In Sibelius dragging a staff is one step - click and drag. In Dorico (for me) it’s one keyboard shortcut from anywhere, then click and drag.

I’ve seen countless Sibelius files where somebody accidentally dragged a stave and didn’t catch it. I’ve never seen a Dorico project where someone accidentally dragged a stave and didn’t catch it. For me, that difference is worth Cmd-Alt-3 (or whatever it is - I’m not in front of it).

The same goes for not being able to drag pitches up in Dorico - you need Lock duration turned on in order to click-replace a pitch, or you need Alt in addition to the arrow keys.

Now of course, we should all proof read. I’ve definitely been guilty of handling a publisher’s request to fix something on page 40 of a 60 page Sibelius score, not realising that when I grabbed page 39 or 41 I was actually dragging a note 10 ledger lines off the top of the staff. A lot of thought has gone into reducing the possibility for user error in Dorico.

Hilarious! I tell you my experience with your software that I paid a lot of money for and your rebuttal to me is that you are not being argumentative and then proceeded to do so… so conversely I’m not trying to be argumentative either merely stating my experience with your software and that’s not even mentioning the janky installation process… so 100% yes there are problems but don’t straddle or conflate your issues on the user when obviously the problem is solely related to the software’s architectural design

I appreciate you actually being civil and trying to help me! I actually like that Sibelius actually allows flexibility in its design… I would like to know how to move the grand staff over and to place certain texts on the side almost as an indentation if you could help me do that that would be great

Both @dan_kreider and I are fellow users. Please quit the “us and them” thing.

Then don’t do it to me either… you came off as helpful he came off as a jerk

Forums and keyboards and computer screens bring out the worst in all of us. It wasn’t intended, I assure you. This is a professional and polite forum, generally speaking, though no one’s perfect!

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I understand there’s no hard feelings I just want to get the best out of this experience and using the software

The quick and dirty method would be to use the Note Spacing tool in the left panel of Engrave mode to shunt the grand staff over, then use either a text frame or manually-positioned Shift-X text. Or you could replace the instrument name with whatever text you want.

If you want something that’s quickly reusable either elsewhere in the project or in different projects, you’d do well to spend a few minutes creating a master page whose Music Frame is narrower.

I’m happy to elaborate on either of these methods, or point you somewhere helpful, but is this something you’re going to need lots of times or just once?

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Layout Options–Note Spacing. You can choose to indent the first system by a large amount, then place text as desired.

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Awesome! I really needed this information I couldn’t figure out how to do this and it was really frustrating actually! Thank you and @pianoleo I really appreciate it a lot actually!

I don’t use it myself, as it’s not how I compose but the best midi import I’ve encountered is ScoreCloud. It’s a subscription model but you can subscribe for a month and get all your midi transcriptions saved as xml files. You can also use it for free to try but without export.

I would love to see some kind of integration with Cubase, where the scores I write in Dorico can easily be sent to Cubase and transformed into tracks with MIDI information, where I can then finish producing my audio demo / album.

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I would love a parameter that allows me to not be locked to 10 seconds of silence at the end of an audio export. I wish that were a preference you could set.

I would love to see meta data fields from the project and flows make their way into exported MP3 audio files as tags.

I would love the ability to export by group/stems.

I would love to see scripting finished (with access to said fields) but I believe that won’t be till much farther along, and I get the reasons why.

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Hello,
It would be interesting to add a tab for the accordion with the 15 right hand registers and the left hand registers for the accordion as well as the symbols for the standard and chromatic bass.
If there is a harp tab, there should also be this accordion tab because it has its own techniques, a bit like the organ.
It would also be a good idea to think about a tablature module for diatonic accordion which is also in high demand as no software supports real-time transcription.
if not bravo for this software which is already very accomplished.

Some of these have possibly been brought up already, but:

  1. Hide empty staves on a per-frame basis in Engrave mode, rather than universally from Layout Options
  2. Entering polymetric music (the 4/4 = 12/8 thing) without needing to use hidden tuplets etc
  3. Section headings that can be placed just above tempo text, as a system text object, rather than a text frame
  4. Multiline tempo indications, tempo indications with text after the metronome mark, and the ability to enter all of these things directly into the popover (e.g. “Allegro h. = 126 or faster <\br> (in 1)”)
  5. The option to (re)activate the old Dorico 2 behaviour of Force Duration staying on until manually turned off, rather than automatically turning off when you leave note entry mode
  6. The ability to combine microtonal accidentals, rather than constantly having to define a new one for every possible combination
  7. When creating a divisi, a solo instrument should automatically be created above the existing tutti staff, rather than taking over the old unison staff and the new gli altri staff moved to a new one below it
  8. When creating a divisi, elements in the “automatic unison” created by Dorico in the rest of the system before the divisi should be able to move independently in engrave mode
  9. It would be nice (although I’m not holding my breath) if one could enter dynamics text (e.g. dolce, sotto voce, mezza voce, etc) without a hidden dynamic marking (e.g. pp, p, mp, etc) attached, à la Expression Text in Sibelius
  10. For piano music: a “gradual lift” line that either is dashed or slopes upwards, is appended to the end of a normal pedal line, and can be defined in length
  11. Also for piano music: for the 1/2 and 1/4 pedal lines etc to be displayed not only with the pedal line in the appropriate position but also with the fraction “1/2” or “1/4” prior to the pedal indication, since one can’t count on pianists understanding Dorico’s/Gould’s preferred notation
  12. Also for piano music: in addition to the full pedal lift, a 1/2 or 1/4 pedal lift
  13. The option for notes in irrational bars (e.g. 5/6, 4/7 etc) to be displayed as tuplets, even though Gould says not to; she’s wrong, and it’s a pain to create nested 7:4 and 4:7 tuplets and then hide the second one, etc (also in those cases some of us may prefer for the tuplet bracket to be open-ended and that then requires creating a new line, which never looks exactly like a tuplet, etc)
  14. Ability to put ties and tuplets in tempo indications and metric modulations
  15. It would be nice if, when creating a divisi into solo instrument(s) and full section, for the solo instruments to automatically load a solo instrument sound instead of having to assign it to a new voice and then change the sound manually in HALion (or whatever audio player one uses)
  16. It would be nice to be able to export, say, just whatever the current selection is (i.e. a few notes, or one staff in a system, or etc) as a graphic, instead of having to export an entire frame and then delete the unwanted parts of it in inkscape
  17. Ability to create staves with any number of lines, in any position, as well as cutaway staves and changes in staff type; for example, (Time and Motion Study II and Gran Torso are the touchstones by which I judge any music engraving software)
  18. And on that note: custom clefs; custom fermatas; custom ornaments; etc. Allow user-customised anything

I think those are the main points. I guess it would be nice if you could also display player numbers on the same staff in a condensed score as automatically vertically stacked, rather than having them sometimes display as Oboes 1.2 if they’re in the same voice, but there’s probably a way to fix that that I just haven’t looked for yet.

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