Musing about the transpose dialog

When transposing by quality, since the available qualities are dependent on the selected interval, shouldn’t the interval appear first on the menu?

This is always confusing to me:
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I want to transpose up by a Perfect 5th. I go to the Quality dropdown menu, and look for the word “perfect”. Alas, after scanning all the available options (diminished, minor, major, augmented, diatonic), I realize “perfect” isn’t an option. “hmm… that’s weird”.

Ah! But of course, I need to change the interval from the dropdown below first, because it is currently set to “third”.

I realize that I am transposing by “quality” but if the quality is dependent on the interval (and not the other way around) then the interval should appear before the quality.

Am I wrong?

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It’s been already discussed : yes, this window makes no sense unless you’re English or American. The solution is either cope with the strange order of operations or use the interval builder on the right of the window (starting note-end note, apply, the appropriate interval is chosen).

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And even in English – it reads grammatically, but does not function logically.

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Speaking as an American (feels like I need to add an apology when I say that these days) it seems awkward to me too.

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I’m pretty sure that at various points since the Transpose dialog was introduced we’ve had these two controls each way around, and people have complained. You can’t please all the people, etc. etc.

I can certainly appreciate the conundrum here — the quality depends on the chosen interval, so you have to choose the interval first if the desired quality doesn’t apply to the currently selected interval. I wonder if it might be possible to allow all qualities to be selectable in the quality control, and then change on-the-fly the interval to something that’s compatible with the chosen quality (or to something like ----- to indicate a new interval needs to be selected), or leave the selected interval as-is if it’s compatible with the chosen quality.

I imagine people would complain about that too, so if interval and quality are not to be changed, Dorico might as well leave it as is. People will learn.

Yeah, especially the on-the-fly changing of a control would probably be unsettling to some (most?) folks. Like you said, people will learn. Corollary: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. :grinning:

I thought that saying was, “If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it.” :grimacing:

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Or in this case, if it ain’t Baroque, don’t transpose it?

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