Playback - the green line

Dorico
#66

We’ve found a bug recently, where the playhead stops following the score, if new music is added to the end of score after the first playback.

If you add music to the end of score before the first playback, everything should be fine, the playhead follows the score to the end for the first time. But if you add (enough, usually more than four bars) more music and play it back again, the playhead will move out of the view, as soon as it reaches the newly added bars.

This pattern is hard to recognise because sometimes changing layout or page view/galley view resets the relevant states. I think it can also be triggered by inserting music in the middle of the score in which case the playhead leaves the view as soon as it reaches the inserted music.

I wonder if this is what you experience?

#67

András,

Congratulations on this progress!

I am still experiencing the bug.

When you say ‘first playback’, do you mean only the very first time a score is Played in Write mode?

And that it is the very act/process of adding bars at the end which is confusing Dorico, which is (perhaps: this is what I gather from your post) causing it to lose or otherwise incorrectly set (pointers to) the correct position for the playhead (from that moment on)?

In general terms, this would seem to be what I for one (others may have different experiences?) have noticed.

Though with the exception of the fact that my workflow is always:

  1. add bars in Write mode (at the end) or edit bars (anywhere)
  2. play back in Write mode… sometimes from the start, although usually not
  3. continue with 1

Is this consistent with what you have found?

It may be that the bug surfaces only after one playback (does that have to be the complete score composed so far in your investigations?).

And I’d have said that I lose the Playhead more frequently the longer a session progresses.

But I’m sure that it - although it probably does happen after first playback - I rarely get the bug every time I play back; regardless of where I edit or add.

Please keep your discoveries coming: I’d love to help you track it down. And thanks again!

#68

We believe the problem is fixed in our development builds, as described by András above. Every time you add enough music that a new system is added in page view, or new bars are added in galley view, then the score will only be followed as far as the last system (or chunk of bars in galley view, which doesn’t have systems of course but which Dorico splits into chunks internally). Saving, closing and reopening the project will alleviate the symptoms, until you add enough new bars that a new system is added.

As I say, this problem is fixed in our development builds, so I am confident you won’t experience it again after the next update is released, whenever that may be.

#69

That’s extremely good news, Daniel. Thanks. Looking forward to this immensely :slight_smile:

#70

I also experience strange behavior of the green line, but there is said much about that in this post …
I add a different angle of view. How-about a keyboard shortcut like > ‘go to the playhead/green line’. I need that a lot because I fix something in an other place and want to go back where the playhead is. Yes I know, that I could hit the spacebar and hit it again to stop. But I want to go the exact stop point. And it would be even cooler if I could use this shortcut while the tune is playing back. So I could “fix” the problem with the green line going out of view.

#71

Jürg,

Are you suggesting this as an interim measure?

Surely, once the bug is fixed and the playback head anomaly is removed from the next production version, the green line will always be visible because the score will always have scrolled properly?

Or are you suggesting something that might be of greater use anyway: that such a shortcut (as ‘>’) would do two things together:

  1. stop/pause/halt playback
  2. move the caret to the playhead (ready for immediate further editing)

?

This prompts me to ask a question which I’ve wanted to ask wince this first came up and Daniel was kind enough to point me personally to some solutions: does the fact that I come to Dorico not as a trained musician (no degree, no performing experience; but 60+ years of listening and loving music) make me (and those who use Dorico in a similar way) more likely to experience it?

To put is bluntly: are most users able to compose by writing long sections of music without ever needing to hear it played back?

I play back frequently (and so provoke the behaviour) every few bars… maybe once a minute etc!

Is that relevant in view of what András says?

#72

I also play back frequently. This essential also for proof hearing besides other situations.

#73

I can only speak for myself, but I would guess “no performing experience” is very relevant here. Beyond the “beginner level” of learning to physically operate the instrument, any sort of “performance” involves a feedback loop of imagining what sound you want to produce, and making corrections to your actions playing the instrument (either on-the-fly in live performance, or through a lot of hard thinking and experimenting in the rehearsal room) to produce what you imagined.

IMO it doesn’t seem a big step beyond that to imagine something and write it down reasonably accurately, without continual checking through computer playback. In fact I sometimes switch off “play notes as you enter them” because the “random noises” when jumping around between different instruments in the score are more of a distraction than a help.

One of my favorite quotes (from Kodaly) is about exactly this duality: “The goal of music education is to teach you how to see with your ears, and hear with your eyes”.

The developers claim to have found a logical error which manifests itself in ways that don’t fit any obvious pattern that the user would be likely to find, and fixed it.

From my experience of software development, the only way to find out of that is a “complete” solution to the problem is to wait and see what happens after you fixed it. But Occam’s razor often applies, and “randomly occurring” problems tend to have one root cause (which can take a long time to track down!), not several.

#74

Thanks, ReRei! That’s re-assuring and encouraging :slight_smile:.

#75

Rob,

Thanks. Yes.

I certainly appreciate what you say about the (software) development process (having been a developer myself for several decades).

But if the bug manifests itself (only) as a result of the relationship between adding/editing bars and playing them back, it would suggest that those who cannot ‘hear with their eyes’ and so who do not often play back, will encounter it less often.

(I am certainly nowhere near able to hear notes just by looking at them. Not sure if I should even try. All advice welcome!)

#76

Well, you can probably “hear” English text just by looking at it. Doing the same with music isn’t so hard as you might think. But it helps to start young, as with learning anything.

#77

Rob - so you really think it’s worthwhile in the long term making the effort to hear what I see?

If it is, I’ll happily set aside time to do such training. It does seem like a huge hill to climb at my age :slight_smile:. Thanks.

#78

Due to my experiences it is never too late to learn and children don’t learn faster than adults. It always depends on the so called talent and diligence.

#79

Thanks to you too, ReRei! I know you are also right. I have plenty of diligence. Ear Training apps here I come…

#80

Children have the advantage that, unless somebody tells them, they don’t decide not to even try to do something “because it’s too hard”.

There is a lot of junk on the web, but for common-practice tonal music this was made by professionals for students between the end of secondary school and the start of a university course, and it starts right from the beginning: http://dictation.ccdmd.qc.ca/presentation.php

#81

Thanks, Rob!

#82

Thanks, Rob!

+1
Thanks, Rob, this looks great - I have often looked for helpful online materials on ear training and music theory but most are too elementary to be useful to those of us who already have significant musical experience and reasonable skill but lack training of a more academic sort.

#83

Beethoven did. But then his idea of composition was pretty much:

I I I I | V V V V | I I I I | V V V V |
I IV | I IV | V V V V | V V V V |
I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV |
V V | V V | V V | V V |
I | I | I | I | Oooooooooooooooooone.

So I’m not sure anybody needs to hear that on playback.

#84

That’s not true. Beethoven is much more complex.

#85

Well, Beethoven did end his 8th symphony with more than 50 bars of the tonic chord, but that was MEANT to be a joke - he said so himself.

But if the previous post was meant as a joke, it didn’t work for me. Watching a jazz guitarist trying to sightread the chords for the Grosse Fuge might be more fun…