My own feedback with Dorico (after 1 week)

Dorico
1

Hello all,
I’m new to the forums, just recently got on board since Dorico came out (bought it that morning I was so excited!) and I must say that I am extremely impressed in many areas! While I have not switched over completely yet due to both missing features and that most of my stuff is still in Sibelius form, all of my new projects are being written in Dorico. I’m a composition major wanting to due film scoring, so I’ve been using Dorico on all the assignments for my classes; it’s already saved me a lot of time on these little things and I’m really happy for it.

While most of the critical feedback I was going to give has already been addressed, I just wanted to add in a few comments of my own that I didn’t see scrolling through the forums. While I think that the livestream video, the tutorial videos, and the in-program help do a decent job, I still think that the documentation could use some work, at least from my perspective. For instance, although most of the tools on the left side in write mode have the shortcuts if you hover over them, articulations do not, and I was left to search through the key commands in order to find them. Also, although Daniel’s FAQ is here to answer these questions now, in the beginning something as simple as how to shift a note up or down (or by an octave) I could not find anywhere, and thus I simply tried random keys and combinations until I discovered it. Maybe I’m just dumb, but I read through all the online help and all every key command and couldn’t find it. Perhaps not knowing what the command is called (instead of move note maybe it’s called something else that didn’t catch my attention) contributed to some of this.

Also, I have yet to find a way to override the flow notation options for a specific note. an example of this is in 6/8 writing 16th then dotted 8th Dorico puts in 16th, 16th tied to 8th, regardless of the notation options. While I think that the global options are great for 90ish% of the time, there should be a way to override in a specific circumstance (if there isn’t already. Again, if I’m just stupid please let me know :mrgreen: )

I think in many respects Dorico is already leaps and bounds in many areas, keep up the good work and I can’t wait for the updates! Take your time to do it right, Dorico is already great and can only get better!

Cheers!
Paul

2

You’re not stupid, Paul. Force Durations is what you need in order to make this work the way you want: it’s the icon that looks like a G clamp in the toolbox on the left-hand side, shortcut O. When Force Durations is on, Dorico will take the note durations that you specify during note input literally, and won’t renotate them according to meter etc. Use this sparingly, as it ties Dorico’s hands and it won’t be able to produce correct notation if you subsequently e.g. change the meter, or insert music to push the rest along. You can undo the effect of Force Durations by selecting the affected notes and choosing Edit > Reset Appearance.

Glad that you’re otherwise enjoying Dorico so far, and please know that the team are working hard to improve both the software and the documentation as quickly as possible.

3

Daniel,
Thanks! I was still unsure as to what the function of that button was. When I was fooling around before and trying the buttons out it didn’t seem to be doing anything so I left it alone :smiley:

Thanks for being patient with all of us here on the forums, I look forward to more great times with dorico!

4

With Force Duration i found the problem that it is canceled again, when the note i applied Force Duration to is tied from a note to the left, earlier in the bar (see example). Can this be solved at the moment?
Force Duration on dotted half note before tied.png
Force Duration on dotted half note after tied.png

5

I think there is a problem in the current version where using T to tie doesn’t respect the state of the Force Duration option, but I believe this has already been fixed and won’t be a problem in the first post-release update. For now, if you use T to tie while typing in the music in the first place during step-time input (i.e. with the caret visible) then I believe everything will work – it’s only adding the tie afterwards that causes the problem.