No I did not know that. That does explain it a bit more but to me and to several folks I displayed this to agreed with me that a meter change form, in this case the example of 4/4 to 5/4, should have five beats and/or add the necessary rest.
To me that is the only thing that is logical because no matter how you go about it or work around it to fix it to make it correct there has to be 5 beats in that 5/4 bar. Period.
This seems similar to a disagreement I had with MM about Finale and ties across a bar line not carrying an accidental with it. Because there is not case where a tied note will not be the same note even though it crossed the bar line. If it doesn’t that is a slur.
Again this is something MM didn’t do or couldn’t do or didn’t know how to do because it never was fixed to this day. I need to realize Dorico has similar but different quirks that either they can’t do or don’t know how to do to fix it.
@eebiggs1 It might seem reasonable to expect that when one increases the number of beats in a measure that rests are added to fill the measure — something to show that it is incomplete (other than a proofreading notice).
Consider a scenario going the other way — from a 5/4 meter (which is filled with notes) to 4/4. If Dorico were to deal with this in a way that you feel is intuitive (a relative term), how should it proceed? Should it push the now displaced beat to the next measure, causing all following notes to be “pushed” along? Should the extra beat be truncated? Or, should it be left to the composer’s discretion as to what is correct and how to correct it? (Maybe highlighting notes in the extra beat(s) in some way that would draw one’s attention to the error created by the meter change?)
If you want Dorico to add both a new time signature and musical time, just engage insert mode (I) before creating the time signature (and remember to disengage it afterwards).
This allows Dorico to pad the final bar (if needed) to ensure the beats do match the time signature.
No matter how you guys try to spin it the 5/4 measure should have that last rest included and then let up to the composer to decide what he wants to do with just like the other way.
On that we agree but that does not make it musically correct. No matter how you spin it that measure should have five beats. No different than MM claiming the tie across a bar line was acceptable. Look, it’s OK if that’s how Spreadbury wants to do it but we the people just need to know that and how to correct it. There is no denying it, Finale had/has many quirks and Dorico is no different just different quirks.
So why are you not complaining about the creation of a 2/4 bar with only one beat? The behaviour is identical. And the solution is the same (use insert mode if you want to pad the final bar)
Well for one thing that is visual. I know the orphan bar needs something. Going the other way the bar looks normal with note spacing nice and tidy. It is not apparent especially to new people and exactly why so many of use claim Dorico is not intuitive. Perfect example.
Yeah, to you guys that are experienced with Dorico you think nothing of it but you have to put yourselves in the place of new inexperienced people. It’s not the way I would have done or I even like the way Dorico has done it.
In all honesty, I think Dorico’s default way of handling this is weird too. Considering all the other areas where Dorico goes out of its way to ensure “correct” notation, defaulting to something that is 1) not only wrong, but wrong enough to derail a rehearsal, and 2) obviously not what the user wants (pickup bar meter syntax is different) seems like a poor choice. I’d love to see a Preferences setting (or maybe Notation Options setting?) to automatically fill any incomplete bars with rests when applying a time signature change. Having to invoke another step, especially a dangerous one that will wreck your score if you forget to turn it off, just to get what the user almost certainly wants in the overwhelming majority of the cases, seems like a wasted workflow step that could be simplified.
Political overtones of that last quoted phrase aside, @eebiggs1, I kindly request for all of our sakes — fellow users and Dorico team alike — that we keep the tenor of this forum away from ad hominum jabs at one another and/or the dev team and squarely and professionally on the software and its use. (@FredGUnn has been a great model in this thread.)
There’s so much goodwill in this forum, and we would all lose if intentionally frictional language were to become the norm.
Apparently that is how Daniel wants to do it, and people do know about it: even you now know about it (and since Daniel reads all these threads, he know how you feel about it) so you should not be surprised by this feature in the future.
I know it now. But neither I nor any of the people I gave this thread to, to read and showed my musical example knew it. Nobody, not one.
Not that it makes any difference but just for kicks and grins MuseScore does it correctly by default. I get it’s Daniel’s preference and now that I know what that is, it’s simple to work around it. I am used to work arounds sinec I used Finale for decades. It’s just not expected behavior from a an app that adds rests automatically everywhere else.
I think another way this trips people up is that many users don’t realize the relationship between barlines and meter in Dorico. Even though the meter isn’t explicitly restated here, the explicit double barline is in effect a statement of the meter, so the user gets this result, with an incomplete bar, even though Dorico correctly adjusts the meter after the double barline and automatically inserts a rest:
Also, there already is a popover command to get a 5/4 bar with 4 beats in it. If the user really actually wants that, they should use that syntax:
Since 5/4,4 will already get you a 5/4 bar with 4 beats in it if that’s what’s desired, I really think that 5/4 should result in a bar with 5 beats by default without having to invoke Insert. Or at least give the user the option to have that functionality.
I agree more education/tutorial material is needed to explain how Dorico treats musical time (and time signatures and barlines) - and yes, I would like a signpost on all pickup bars/manual barlines.
However I am extremely grateful for the way it currently works.
When composing my brain is not thinking about bars, rather it is thinking of phrases - often of unequal length. Later I will decide, for readability and logic, to change bar lengths and I would hate it if new rests were added just because I changed a time signature (I just want the music divided up a different way).
I know that I may be in the minority, but this minority really likes the current implementation.
What this approach exposes is the tyranny of the barline that caused all other notation programs to leap though musical hoops, and which in turn conditioned people to believe those ways were somehow the logical way to do things.
I see it rather like the qwerty conundrum - we are now conditioned to use a keyboard that was designed to be inefficient!
I can’t emphasize enough how much I support such a perspective.
Considering myself a bloody amateur, I found this forum extremely helpful, supportive, informative and kind.
It goes without saying that showing some basic level of respect towards everybody in this forum, and in particular towards the good people at Steinberg, is something we all will benefit from in the short and in the long run.
