Is it completely out of the realm of reality to have a kind of proportional “mode”, where music is based on seconds instead of beats? This would ideally include a drag & drop system for note lengths, seconds over tacets instead of # of measures, etc. This can all be faked pretty well now, much better than any other program, but it is still cumbersome.
It would also be very helpful to have some kind of button that enters a timestamp above the score wherever your cursor is, with or without proportional notation.
Dorico really doesn’t have any good features for truly proportional notation at the moment, though it’s something we may well support in a future version.
Marc’s advice to use markers is spot-on, though: bring the playhead to the selection position using Alt+P, then type Shift+Alt+M to add a marker. You can control how the marker appears using the options on the Markers page of Engraving Options.
Setting the note spacing ratio to 2 will get close, but the spacing may affected by things in the staff that are not notes (accidentals, clefs, bar lines, etc).
How about using a note with a longer duration so that it naturally takes up more space, and an overridden notehead type that draws a black notehead instead of (say) a whole notehead?
Please add proportional notation. It is so much needed in contemporary music and would catapult Dorico straight forward compared to the other notational software. Please, please add it.
Welcome to the forum, Micha. We certainly don’t rule out implementing proportional notation in a future version of the software, but it’s not something we are working on right now.
A +1 for proportional notation. No software can do it. I used Lilypond for a decade and it has some proportional notation capabilities but it never works even when diving deep into the Lilypond internals. It’s one of the reasons I abandoned Lilypond and moved to Dorico (despite Dorico not having this). I hope we can get this at some time in the future. As one poster says, it’s commonly found in many contemporary scores, which are of such rich complexity that having proportional notation really helps the players keep in sync.
This is the problem with notation software… First you have to get the Common Era completely nailed fully and entirely, and then you can expand outward to early music, baroque and also chant etc, and then expand outward to coverage of some of the more common things in modernist and contemporary music. I know this takes a very long time to address the needs of we folk who live under the left and right tails of the Gaussian musical period curve
Finale actually does this natively. Beat-spacing is applied by default, but if you turn it off, within each bar everything is strictly proportional, and you can set the measure widths to be proportional to their length.
