I’m referring here to the Alt-N and Alt-M technique
Possible duplicate in part of Copy/paste strangely sensitive to settings - Dorico - Steinberg Forums
Trying to avoid the “wouldn’t it be nice if it worked differently” whinge, I wonder if the following is expected behaviour?
Create two-stave piano part in 4/4
Create 3 triplet quavers on lower stave (any notes)
Select the notes (either by clicking on the beam or dragging across the note heads
Move to upper stave (Alt-N)
Result:
Notes are moved but not as a tuplet
Tuplet rests are left behind in an otherwise empty bar
Expected result:
Notes are moved as a tuplet
Whole bar rest in the lower stave (same as if notes were cut or deleted)
To achieve what I wanted, I need to select the noteheads AND the tuplet number I then get the expected result. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t expect tuplet quaver rests to be left behind in my problem case.
Another manifestation (and not a duplicate of the above mentioned post):
Create 3 tuplet quavers on lower stave
Create 3 non-tuplet quavers on upper stave
Select non-tuplet quavers on upper stave
Move to lower stave (Alt-M)
Result:
Quavers from upper stave are forced into tuplet on lower stave
Expected result:
Both tuplet quavers and non-tuplet quavers on the lower stave
Thoughts?
This is indeed the designed behaviour. If you cut a note from a tuplet and paste it somewhere else – which is what you’re doing when you do Alt+N/M, except that Dorico does the two steps for you in one – then the note will become unscaled from the tuplet.
I agree, though, that there are circumstances when it would be useful for Dorico to unilaterally decide to include the tuplet when you paste notes, but it’s tricky to get this right such that it always does what you would want. The problem is that Dorico of course can’t predict the future and doesn’t know what you’re about to do next: I would guess that about half of the time it’s useful for the tuplet to be included, and half the time it’s not.
Thanks for the speedy reply. Not convinced by your argument in the second case, however…
Dorico’s philosophy appears to be to do exactly what you ask. If you don’t select the tuplet number or a hidden note or a hidden flag, you don’t get it moved. I understand. Dorico doesn’t try and be too clever. However, isn’t Dorico trying to be too clever in deciding that you do want tuples in the second case? Why not follow your simple philosophy? You selected non-tuplets, move non-tuplets.
Just looking for consistency 
Sure, you may not like the behaviour in either case, of course. We have to try to play the numbers when we’re designing this stuff and try to guess what we think is going to be more useful more of the time. At the moment, when you paste, notes are scaled into tuplets that already exist on the staff, hence the program behaves the same when you use Alt+N/M.
“At the moment, when you paste…”. Interesting turn of phrase.
Just being mischievous…