It depends if it’s for a drummer or a musician.
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I have a T-shirt that says
trumpet player: dynamics? I’m playing as loud as I can!
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Love this feature - the number of flagged items on my 50 minutes-long major work is quite humbling. 90% of them were about the placing of dynamics - the bane of my life, I always miss something.
A lovely feature request would be to add a “FIX” button to have them all rectified immediately. Would save so much time - but I am just grateful this feature is now a part of Dorico.
Thank you developers.
Pete
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I would say that in many cases, Dorico can’t know how to fix the issue. For example, if you have two identical dynamics a few bars apart, is the second one redundant, or did you forget to put a different one in the middle? Same with two consecutive playing techniques, and so on…
My standard procedure with mutes is to have a “to mute” indication after the last unmuted note and a “muted” indication above the first muted note (people don’t pay attention…).
In Dorico 6, I’m getting the following proofreading notes:
This doesn’t make sense to me.
I wonder if those playing techniques have ended up with a duration, somehow? Durationless techniques shouldn’t trigger that warning. If you can attach a short example we can take a look.
I went back to the five works I’ve done in Dorico since Sept, all in v5, just to see what the new Proofreading function would flag. Most or all were very minor; it flagged some non-restatements of dynamics (my works usually just have a single dynamic stated up front), my having a dynamic also stated in the other staves of a piano work, etc. But two things seemed odd to me. One was this one in a work for two violins, in which I changed to arco in both violins after a short group of pizzicati; it flagged the arco in the second violin but I’m not clear why it didn’t think I was serious about making the change to arco stick and would have wanted to change back to pizz (the first two notes are about this):
The other one keeps coming up in scores where I added a staff. Unless it’s a new system, the staff doesn’t always display so I displayed the new clef upon the addition of the staff and it flagged it as redundant:
I’m not sure why staves that get added mid-page don’t have staves displayed, but it’s also odd that it would have been flagged as redundant after I added it. Same thing happened in a work I’m currently writing for open instrumentation (but so far, two vibraphones and one piano are working nicely in playback). I only noticed this upon changing to the new fill view.
Here in Page View, I had added a staff below with a bass clef in measure 22. All good:
But if I go to Fill View, the bass clef is gone:
No problem; I go ahead and add it with the clef popover, and now the Proofreading tool flags it:
None of this is any big deal. But I’m not sure why some of this is getting flagged (not the arco marking nor the clef that was missing), nor do I understand why addition of a new staff lacks a displayed clef until the next system. Thanks!
The problem with “arco” is probably that you’ve ended up with a playing technique with a duration.
With the clefs, I think these are just expected differences between what Galley/Fill View shows and what Page View shows.
Re: arco –not sure how it has a duration but I’ll check it out. Thanks.
The other thing isn’t just about Fill View. Same thing happened in Page View as I had added the staff mid-page and specified a clef. That one still baffles me.
It’s quite hard to answer these sorts of questions in abstract. If you’re able to attach a project showing a problem you’re having then we can take a look.
Understood. I don’t have an issue with this, just was trying to understand why some of these things were flagged.
In this case, I just fixed it by removing the “arco” in question and re-adding it. The one that caused the issue had two circles on it when clicked, as if it were a graphic that could be extended or stretched. Never saw that before, but now it’s all good and the warning went away in Proofreading. I generally do attach projects with problematic issues, especially if in process (this was a prior work that is done; the recording is already on Spotify). Thanks!
That suggests it had a duration. If you create a playing technique when you have multiple notes selected (multiple notes spread out in time, that is, not multiple notes in a chord) then the playing technique will be created with a duration. For playing techniques that have a solid line defined as their continuation then this would be obvious in the score, but for things like arco and pizz this isn’t the case.
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I hadn’t known this and it makes sense as the culprit. It didn’t affect playback, so I didn’t notice the duration attribute). I must have accidentally selected three notes when applying arco instead of just one. Now I know. Thanks!
This feature is amazing!
That said, I agree with those asking for the ability to hide results that aren’t relevant to us.
Especially since, after correcting a result, Dorico sends us back to the top of the list every time, which means we lose track of where we were because we have no choice but to leave dozens of results that don’t require any changes!
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Agreed. For the few scores I’ve done since Sept in Dorico, applying the Proofreading feature in some cases came up with around 14 warnings, none of which affected playback or the actual “correctness” of the score (in some cases, it warned me that it’s been awhile since I had a dynamic level specified, but I typically only employ a single dynamic so it just didn’t pertain to me). Granted, there is no good way for Dorico to know my peculiarities as a composer. But if I could disregard a bunch of them manually, that would help since, as some of my works are pretty long (2-4+ hours), Dorico could note dozens of warnings, and things that are really problematic would get lost.
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I’m very curious to how this feature was implemented. As a developer by day, I might have gone with a rules engine. If this was done, it could be conceivable to create custom rules, perhaps via Lua. (It also possible to create a UI for this, but as someone who’s done this, it’s a tremendous amount of work.)
The team has said that this is the first iteration, so I expect significant changes/improvements in future versions. They’re getting plenty of feedback to know what the users would like.
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Agree with all of the above praise for the proofreading feature; it’s great to have and has already caught a number of little mistakes in old scores I’ve opened up.
My issue is with the navigation of the proofreading panel. It seems to constantly want to snap back to the top of the list. Some of my scores contain 99+ issues, many of which can be disregarded (I use a lot of intentionally un-aligned meters/repeat structures, unconventional playing techniques, etc.). But every time I “resolve” an actual issue, the list rewinds to the very top, losing my place and interrupting the workflow. This also happens whenever I save the document. I understand that Dorico is constantly recalculating and looking for new issues, but I would love if the default behavior would be to “lock” the position of the list so I could continue working through it.
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I would suggest that instead of hiding them (because Dorico recalculates the whole score each time), it would be great to have an option to mark them as solved—perhaps with a custom sign or a changed background color..
It’s been suggested too many times already here, on FB… and well, the Team knew this would happen, so they tried (Anthony did try) to minimize this with his explanation in the video. But I guess we engravers do not want to leave any possible remark about our work (even if we know it’s not really relevant). I totally get it: this is a job that does require to be quite obsessional and leaving a red flagged 99 somewhere is not comfy. Anyway, I don’t think it’s something that is going to drastically disappear, but the noise floor might be lowered at some point, with the rules refining.
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(With all these posts, who’s had time to check the videos? 
I’ve barely had time to use the program. 
)
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