Playback of Instrument Groups

Dorico
1

Hi everyone,

As I begin to delve into playback (even though it makes everything slower on my laptop) I noticed a few things:

  1. Sometimes the string articulations get messed up and I have a hard time resetting from pizz. to arco — probably a bug?
  2. Some hairpins don’t play properly, especially to/from niente — I think this has been reported already…
  3. Playback seems to take a long time to start after hitting Play — anyone else seeing this?
  4. Selecting a single instrument or group of instruments does not solo them in playback — which I liked when working in Sibelius;
  5. There are no instrument groups in the mixer (e.g. woodwinds, brass, keyboards, strings, &c.) to help muting/soloing.

Specifically regarding nos. 4–5 above, I would love some way of quickly playing back only specific groups… Steinberg, might this be planned for future upgrades?

Many thanks! –π

2
  1. There was a pizz/arco bug reported last week that could be what you’re seeing
  2. There was a general bug where edits to dynamic objects weren’t respected until the score was reloaded. This is fixed for the next update. This is the first report I’ve seen of niente not playing back correctly - I’ll log that, as I think it’s something that we haven’t yet implemented
  3. This is a known issue. Currently there’s a lot of data that gets recalculated every time you play back. There’s a lot of scope for us to improve caching in this area in the future, but it’s not a trivial job. We do certainly aim to improve it though
  4. A lot of people request this, so it’s something that we may look at in the future
  5. This is something we do hope to add in the future.
3

I’ve now implemented niente hairpins. It transpires that the decresc to niente was working, just not the cresc. This will be in the next update.

4

Dearest Paul, you shouldn’t let us know that it takes about twenty minutes (at 8pm, perhaps even before coffee) to implement a feature, otherwise the more insistent members of the community might start taking notes…!

Thiago, you can use Layouts to workaround 4 and 5. Only instruments in the layout you’re viewing will be played, so you can open a part to solo an instrument, and you can create new layouts with recurring groupings of instruments (instrument families would be the most obvious case) so as to quickly solo them.

That being said, it would be good to do this either in the Mixer or by manipulating the score, like in other softwares.

5

In this specific case, playback of hairpins to/from niente was half-implemented with a couple of missing pieces. Normally it would take considerably longer than half an hour to make such a thing happen!

6

Sweeeeeet! Thanks Paul!

7

Thanks for that idea, Sr. Salgueiro, very interesting indeed and I may tinker with that. Problem is that I have a HUGE orchestral score, and I’m not sure how much more my little laptop can handle… it’s annoyingly slow as is.

Anyway, yes I would love to see faster playback and easier soloing (selections [preferred] or group “tracks in mixer”) implemented, I think it would be a fantastic addition to the application.

(FYI. I use playback to check for mistakes, as 99% of the time I can hear a wrong note if there is one).

Cheers guys –π

8

No problem, senhor Thiago. In theory, just the fact that you’re pulling quite a few instruments out of consideration for playback should speed up processing time, and I don’t think having more layouts open as tabs increases CPU load in any (noticeable, at least) way.

Still, the team is listening, as we can see, and they continue to tinker with things continually.

Good work, Thiago!