The help topic Playing Back Your Music is empty:
I wanted to find out how I can set the play cursor to a specific note position in the score.
As Dorico has been developing rapidly in the run up to launch, many of the features have been evolving while being documented. One of the benefits of our new online help system is that it will allow us to rapidly update the documentation as the application changes. This is obviously one of those areas under revision!
Nevertheless I’ll pass this onto the documentation team just in case they weren’t already aware.
Does anybody know how I can set the play cursor to a specific note position in the score?
After a quick bit of investigation it turns out that, because we’re still in the process of translating our documentation into the various languages the Steinberg supports, the German version was pointing at an outdated version of the English documentation.
This has now been fixed.
To answer your question, if you make a selection and press “p” it should start playing from that point.
Ben, thank you very much!
When several notes are selected then the “p” key plays from the first selected note.
I have a suggestion: It should (optionally) be possible to play ONLY the selected notes (obviously every note at each correct time position). This would allow to:
• Select a passage e.g. with a mouse frame and play ONLY the selected passage
• Select a group of notes where some notes in this group (single notes or partial chord notes) are deselected and play ONLY the selected notes
This would be very useful for composing because it would allow to quickly try out by playback several different versions of a passage without actually deleting any notes.
There’s certainly a plan to have selected items play back (see this thread: this thread) but perhaps not in the way you’re implying.
If I understand it correctly, you’re saying the you’d like to select a range of notes and just hear that played back - perhaps looped. Is that right?
Ben,
What you describe would be quite useful for composition. You could audition specific sections, as little as one note or chord or as large as several measures.
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That certainly something that sounds useful, and is in line with what you can do in Cubase with looping playback between two points.
We’ll add it to our “consider this” list as the playback functions mature.
PS. I hope you don’t mind, but I edited the title of this thread to make it more relevant to the topics discussed so that others can benefit from it.
I consider playback as one of the most useful tools for composing. Therefore the playback features in Dorico should be improved, for example:
• Play the selected notes once (shortcut: p)
• Play the selected notes in a loop (with a small pause in between) (shortcut: shift-p)
• Play with a configurable countdown (applies both to once-playback and loop-playback) (shortcut: shift-ctrl-p)
• Play ONLY the selected notes. Example: You have the sequential notes C-D-F-G and then the chord ACF. Then you select only the sequential notes C, F, G and the notes AF from the chord. Then this would play only the sequential notes C, F, G and the notes AF from the chord. In this way you could try out several selections and when you are happy with it then you use only these notes in the composition.
This method is also called “trial and error” which is the main principle of genetic evolution (see Darwin). And an important part of composing is evolution. Many composers agree with this statement which was also confirmed by the composer in the Dorico live streaming event.
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I’d like to know why, when I select a playback point (a note) at bar X, the playhead jumps back to the beginning. If I select 5 bars further down playback starts from 5 bars after the beginning. I suspect it’s related to having a D.S. (?)
Check Playback Options—Repeats. Do you have the boxes checked to play repeats and “repeats after DS…”?
Solved. I found the “playback options” menus and unchecked “play repeats”. Helps to talk out! 
This is a very old topic, and I can’t seem to find a recent update. Are there any plans to introduce the ability to playback selected notes or bars only (preferably in a loop). To achieve this I currently have to export XML, import it into Cubase and do it there. - it would be really useful to be able to this in Dorico
We certainly do plan to add looping playback in the future, but I can’t say when we might get to it.