But for every situation that a voice last appeared off screen on a previous page, I can think of 20 notes that immediately follow the previous one, and in most music they’re going to be less than an octave from the previous note in that voice.
Even in Liszt piano writing!
In most music any upstem note is more than likely to be above any simultaneous downstem note. Any input system that goes against this is going to cause people to question why. (I probably shouldn’t stoop to suggesting what other people think, but by asking for a change in functionality, well, you’re sort of doing the same thing.)
I trust the development team to have thought long and hard about why they’ve done something a particular way. On the whole, having thought through all the potential issues/edge cases/inconsistencies, they’re right.
Well, I’m going to leave this here for now. But if I come across another example during work where the current behaviour gets in the way, I’ll try and post back.
I don’t think one can interpret a missing feature as punishment to any group of users…
If one is really in a hurry to get one’s music set, a MIDI keyboard avoids the problems you mention altogether.
If the Dorico Team decides to implement this, I will not object, but I agree with Leo that it strikes me as unnecessary.
Ok, here’s another riddle. What will I get if I press ‘E’ on the keyboard in this state? Which e will I get? (The selected note, by the way, is indeed up-stem voice 1, i.e. a blue note – not that you can tell when it’s selected.)
Perhaps you’ve been using the program for so long you’re too set in your ways to realize what loops you’re jumping through to accommodate janky stuff.
You’re honestly saying that 5 keypresses (your system of Shift I - 4 Enter) is better than a single keypress, E?!?
That’s what I do too.
I’m just saying that if the note entered was nearest the selected note, the user experience would still be perfectly consistent, and intuitive, and require less keypresses.
So you can. As I most often use a MIDI kbd to input notes, I only use chord mode when I am making small changes with just the keyboard, and then it has always been easy enough to input the note at the top and transpose it down an octave with a simple key-combination.
Yes, it does.
I wasn’t asking how to input a fourth below, though.
It’s a slightly subtle point I was making.
I was suggesting a simpler, more intuitive and consistent way of doing things: The octave of any note entered with the keyboard note-names should be whatever makes the note closest to the currently selected note.
No more having to check what voice you’re in, what the last note in that voice was (whether it’s offscreen or onscreen), whether you’re in chord mode or not.
Just the closest note to the one selected! Simples!
(Certainly we’ll still need to use modifier keys just as much as we do now. It won’t eliminate the need for modifier keys. It’s just that it makes it easier, a lot easier, to figure out what modifier keys, if any, are needed. In fact, you can tell at a glance by looking at the selected note!)
