Setup Suggestion: 'FINISHED' and 'CANCEL' buttons

Dorico
1

Here’s a tweak I’d really like to see that I think would speed the process of setting up scores. In Setup mode, when you hit one of the ‘Add Player’ buttons, in the instrument window that appears I’d like to see a ‘FINISHED’ button and a ‘CANCEL’ button alongside the Add button. Here’s why:

FINISHED Button:
At the moment, as soon as I hit the ‘Add’ button, it takes me straight back out which means that to add each additional instrument I have to go back down and hit one of the ‘Add player’ buttons. If it’s a big score, that means numerous additional button presses. If it was set up so that hitting ‘Add’ added the instrument but didn’t take you out of the instrument list, but there was also a ‘Finished’ button, I could keep adding instruments then click ‘Finished’ when I’m done, thus alleviating a huge number of button presses (at least as many as there are instruments, minus one) and speeding up the process.

CANCEL Button:
Currently as soon as I hit ‘Add Players’ Dorico adds an empty-handed player to the score. If I decide I made a mistake and didn’t want to add another player or players, I have to come back out, hit the delete key and then confirm how I want to delete it. This to me always feels a little overcomplicated for an empty staff that perhaps wasn’t necessary. Having a ‘Cancel’ button could mean that if after having hit ‘Add’ I hit ‘Cancel’ it would automatically remove any of the instruments just added in that session (I’m assuming the presence of the proposed ‘Finish’ button. Again, it would reduce the number of mouse clicks and to my mind would speed up the setup process, which by and large works really nicely.

C.

2

Thanks for these suggestions, Colin. We have tried to make these operations keyboard accessible: Shift+P adds a new player and shows the popover so you can choose an instrument; Shift+I shows the popover to add a new instrument to the existing player; Alt+up/down arrow move the selected player(s) up and down in the order; and Delete will delete the selected player (and its instruments).

So I would suggest you try Shift+P followed by Shift+I to add players and instruments: I think you will find it a lot quicker.

One current problem is that you can’t hop the selection up and down the list with the arrow keys alone, so you can’t easily select the ‘Empty-handed Player’ to delete it without picking up the mouse, but on the other hand, you don’t actually need to delete said player, as it doesn’t add any staves or other data to the project until you eventually assign an instrument to it.