PLAYBACK issues & Ideas

Firstly, I want to pull my hat off for the Dorico Team !! (You have done some VAST efforts here! Thanks!!)

I just purchased Dorico, after having played with the thought for a long time. Having used Finale until now.
-it sure looks amazingly promising what is going on.


I would like to make this new thread, to give a small little feature-request, and also - I hope that more playback issues and request can be collected in this thread.

  1. In Finale I VERY often use the alt/space combination, to playback “by hand”. (The cursor is the “caret”). And the Shift/alt/Space is the single staff playback. When I check “thick” arrangements, this is an invaluable tool (for me).

  2. I know that playback hasn’t been on the top-of-the-list of things to fix. That is fine with me.
    Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that the (more or less) built-in Halion behaves somewhat weird, concerning loading/changing patches.
    (You probably know this already).

Cheers. Raphael

Thanks for your feedback, Raphael. I agree that “scrub” playback would be a very useful feature for us to add, and I hope we will be able to add this in the future.

Can you say a bit more about what weirdness you have experienced with HALion and loading sounds?

Well… As I imported a midi file, Dorico loaded all sounds good. But, as I wanted to change sounds… just to check out, I noticed that the load arrow (programs) brings an empty window. No patches. Nothing. I can load a program when clicking on the Preset arrow. (Topmost selector). …but that isn’t really how it should be, is it? A Preset is the whole shebang. Programs included. Settings, FX, everything.
…Well, I guess it’s not worse than that. I just load programs in the preset-selector, then… :slight_smile:

Actually; I sat some hours before with this first test-piece, wich HAD loaded sounds in HALion SonicSE2 correctly when I worked on it. No problems. But, as I wanted to ReOpen the file to check it now - HALion didn’t load ANYTHING. Weird. …and - if no sounds are loaded… how can I find a menu-item “open playback-device” (HALion, in this case) ??? I searched for about 5 mins. in all the proper (logical) places… but I couldn’t find ANYTHING. Is the only way by changing Instrument in SETUP-Mode?? (I guess that would be the one place… but it didn’t do anything either).

Ah! - I found the LITTLE button that opens the HALion! (In Play-mode, when OPENING a player…
THAT is ridiculously WELL hidden!) :smiley:

In that case, all you have to do is, stop Dorico, go to /Users//Library/Preferences/VSTAudioEngine and delete that whole folder.
Then start Dorico again (start up will take a little longer than usual due to new contents scanning) and you will see all the presets again.

Thank you Ulf! That solved that problem. :exclamation:

Yes I agree this would be a super improvement I’d love to see in the next Dorico update. I too miss the scrub-audition that’s in Finale by which you can simply click inside a bar or system and drag the play-head forwards or backwards to preview the sound in “thick” arrangements.

Also I’ve found there’s a small but significant delay if you click-select (say a note or rest in Dorico 1.2) and then hit “P” to start previewing from there. This occurs even in small arrangements, and slows down the work-flow (esp when you consider the hundreds of previews during a comp, for me at least, ugh).

Adding sophisticated editing features in the piano-roll arrange window would be a welcome addition in future updates, e.g. to have even more sequencer-like features, like being able to R-click a bar (note) that brings up a lot of things you could do to affect that one note (or selection of notes) such as adding a vst effect to just the selection, or adjust adsr envelope, microdetuning, etc of selected. Or even to R-click on a selection in piano-roll view and get a pop-up that lets you choose a CC or keyswitch that invokes a dynamic (staccato, spiccato, etc) for that selection of note/s from whatever VI library?? This could hopefully get around the arduous task of setting up Expression Maps for other VI players/libraries?

Otherwise, sincerest congrats++ to the whole Dorico development team!! It’s an absolutely superb notation program that breaks new ground! :slight_smile:

+1 here for the scrub-audition function. It is a game-changer for someone who may want to compose directly on Dorico. Without such a feature, the only functional way to do it is on a sequencer (DP, for example).

Another +1 in 2019 for scrub auditioning.

Having spent the last couple months learning a certain, semi open-source, $60 DAW, I’ve gotten so used to scrub auditioning that any other way of working is just painful. To be able to audition any moment in your piece, across any or all instruments, at the click of a mouse — it’s such a huge workflow improvement.

You can sketch out rough chords and voicings and “play” them with the scrub function to work out sequence and timing.
You can slowly walk through busy passages to easily weed out notes that clash.
For those of us lacking a Mozart-like facility with note reading, it really helps cut back on the tedium of loop auditioning and stay in the creative flow.

Though I’m quite comfortable audiating a score, I do find myself wishing frequently for a scrub function as well!