Play mode and flows

Hi!

It would be great if Play mode could respect the flows that are assigned to the currently selected layout.

I have a “working score” that only has one flow assigned so I can work more efficiently. Play mode however gives me all flows, and since the first flow doesn’t yet have any music in it, Play mode is completely empty. In Play mode, I have to use the dropdown to get to the flow I’m currently working on.

I’m not sure if this is intentional and what might be the reasoning behind it, it most certainly feels like it should not be that way.

BTW, while we are at it: Why does the little area between the flow dropdown and the timeline switch to another flow? This gets me again and again, when missing the click to bar 1 by a few pixels. (And since the other flows have no music yet, we are back to an empty Play mode again…)

Greetings, Estigy

Can you send me a screenshot indicating exactly where you need to click to get Dorico to change flow unexpectedly in Play mode? I’ve not been able to reproduce this myself.

Hi, Daniel.

This is the area I’m talking about.
Klicking there cycles through the list of flows “bottom up”. Right now I’m at the last flow (“Auszug”, no music there yet), when I click on the marked area it goes to “Kommunion”, then “Agnus Dei” and so on. When I reach the first flow, it stays.

I will happily send you the file, if you want me to.
Dorico 3.5 on Windows 10, the file was built from scratch in Dorico 3.1, then continued in 3.5.
move-through-flows.png

I’ve tried to reproduce this problem on both Windows and Mac and so far I’ve been unable to. I’m not sure what I might be missing.

Hi Daniel.

Thank you for trying to reproduce the problem.

I tried it on a second file, it showed the same behaviour.
I investigated a bit more and came up with these minimal steps to reproduce it:

  1. Start with a fresh empty project
  2. Add a player with some instrument (doesn’t matter which one)
  3. Add a second flow
  4. Switch to Play mode
  5. Select the second flow from the flow dropdown
  6. Click the “sweet spot” I marked on my screen shot
  7. Dorico jumps back to Flow 1.

Further investigation showed that this “sweet spot” does not always directly switch flows. It first tries to scroll the screen to the left, and when it reaches bar 1, it goes back one flow. Continuing where we left at step #7:

  1. Switch to Write mode
  2. Go to the second flow
  3. Enter a meter (4/4)
  4. Add some bars (I added 30)
  5. Go back to Play mode
  6. Make sure that Flow 2 is selected
  7. Scroll the screen to the right using the bottom scroll bar
  8. Click the “sweet spot” a few times
  9. Dorico first scrolles the screen a bit to the left with each click. When it has reached bar 1, the next click brings you back to Flow 1.

I hope this helps. :slight_smile:

BTW, as I stated in my first post: All this also holds true for layouts that have only one of these flows activated at all. The only difference is that those flows (that should not show up in Play mode in the first place) have no music blocks visible in Play mode. But everything else is the same which should not be like this in my opinion: I can select those inactive flows, the music will not stop at the end of the active flow but continue with the next, etc.

Since I’m only now diving deeper into Play mode, I can’t comment on if this is new or if it has always been like that.

I’ve had this problem since I started using Dorico, I solved it by assigning a couple of buttons on my MIDI keyboard to the Go to Start of Flow and End of Flow commands (you should be able to assign these to the regular keyboard too). I also highly recommend you keep the Play in a new separate window, that prevents a lot of things from resizing and moving.

Thanks for taking the time to provide such clear steps, Estigy. We should be able to improve this now.