Selecting tie chains

You can click on an empty part of a bar to select whatever notes are in the bar, and that’s great. But if you click on an empty part of a bar that contains the end of a tie chain, Dorico thinks you are de-selecting everything.

I haven’t seen this topic on the forum but it happens to me a lot: let’s say I have 5 bars of a long sustained note, all tied together, and I want to make a group selection. I click on the first part of the tie chain (in an empty part of the bar to make sure I have dynamics etc. selected too); the end of the tie chain has a diminuendo which I also want to select.

If the dim. starts in the final bar of the tie chain, you can select it by shift-clicking in an empty part of that final bar. But if the dim. starts somewhere in the middle of the tie chain, then shift-clicking the last bar de-selects the entire passage, and you have to start again.

Has anyone else encountered this? For me, it would be useful to select a tie chain by clicking on an empty part of any bar that contains the tie chain - not just the first bar. Especially when shift-clicking to make a longer selection. I know that tie chains are considered a single object in Dorico, so this may be impossible - but for me at least, I think it could be useful.

Because of Dorico’s structure, a tied note is not in a succeeding measure, it is simply a long note “located” in the measure where it starts.
I have experienced the same thing you have, clicking in a measure to select all notes in the measure (frequently to end a selection) only to realize the note is a tied note and therefore cannot be selected that way. You’d have to CTRL+Click (or the Mac equivalent) to add a hairpin from that measure to a larger selection.

As Walter Cronkite used to say, “That’s the way it is.”

It has indeed been discussed at length, though not recently (I think).

I’ve largely acclimated to this behavior, but I did find myself stymied just yesterday. I agree it’s not intuitive that there a note in a measure that cannot be clicked… and in fact, clicking will remove the previous clicked selection, requiring me to navigate back to it and re-select.

So it’s a +1 from me.

And what makes this doubly odd is that one can click into a totally empty measure (with only a Dorico-added placeholder measure rest) to (for example) paste notes from the clipboard in a copy/paste action.

Dan, use undo when your selection is lost. Quite faster than reselecting :wink:

Dan, use undo when your selection is lost. Quite faster than reselecting > :wink:

Thanks Marc - as always, I really appreciate your wisdom!

Of course! Thanks Marc, that didn’t even occur to me.

I’ve had the same issue with Dorico since the first version that came out. I know why it acts that way and I understand the philosophy behind it. I really hate it and would love some “solution”; it would surely be a time saver (just as the “extend note to selection” asked for by Alan Silvestri)… nuances that save seconds in the workflow but at the end add up to precious payable time.
In the meantime, I have come to get used to the way it is.