Play Window: Yet another request

As anyone new to this software I am having a hell of a time trying to learn and get used to Dorico’s design philosophy and idiosyncrasies. But lack of consistent behaviour between windows is just a step too far… Me thinks!

The Play Window is unintuitively complicated:

1.- Why do we have to open two panels just get to the settings? e.g. Violin (empty lane) > violin VST settings and three to get to the MIDI CC editor? Unless some future feature is coming to this top lane and it’s simply reserved at the moment…? When you have a whole orchestra (30+ instruments) that’s literally 120 clicks just to set the device playback and a 240 to set all CC7 at say 64 (this is just an example, it could be CC11 or CC2, etc.). If it’s too late to change could we please get a Cubase like functionality where I can select multiple instruments and then Alt+click one device and get it assigned to all the selected instruments? And then furthermore, be able to press SHIFT+click on the channel of the first instrument and all the rest of the selected instruments get ascending channel assignments.

2.- I don’t understand why the zoom and navigation method was not copied from Cubase, it would have been useful to have consistency between programs of the same manufacturer. But to have a different method, that not only is it not the same as the DAW, but it’s also not the same as the score window… That’s just baffling. No offence intended and I’m just giving feedback, but could we at least get the mouse wheel to zoom in? And if you are willing to go a bit further, why not give us Cubase method as an option i.e. (Shift+wheel to navigate horizontally, Ctrl+wheel to zoom in and out and wheel on its own to navigate up/down the piano roll). This way we don’t have to navigate completely different from the score/galley windows.

I appreciate your time,

You can at least expand the tracks in Play mode in a single operation using Ctrl+click, which saves some clicks, but I agree that there is certainly plenty of room for further improvement in this area.

I don’t have a mouse with a wheel handy (or indeed at all) but you can pinch on a trackpad to zoom on Mac, so I would expect there to be some corresponding mouse wheel operation in the event that you don’t have a multi-touch trackpad. You should, though, find that once the track display extends out of the bottom of the view, you can indeed scroll in the usual way with the mouse wheel, because Play mode uses regular scroll bars, etc.

Here’s one for a quid: https://www.amazon.co.uk/3-Button-Optical-Scroll-Notebook-Desktop/dp/B00MPFXT6U/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1539734773&sr=8-2&keywords=mouse

As always I appreciate your input but yes, I was aware of all those possibilities. The Ctrl+click just reduces the clicks from 240 to 210 :wink: because it only opens the first panel, not the other two. It would be more useful that it opened everything since it’s there…

In all the windows in Dorico (Setup, Write and Engrave) the default action is Shift+wheel moves horizontally, Ctrl+wheel zooms in and out and wheel on its own moves up/down, but in Play it does not. It would be nice that they were the same. Funny enough this is the same in Cubase, Overture and also Sibelius! So maybe it’s some kind of standard… (?)

Addendum: could we get the options for draw, select, erase, etc as a right click option? This would help a lot for speedy editing… Pretty please, with a cherry on top!

This is a good idea – I’ll add it to the backlog.