Hello, again.
I assume that shift-clicking is a standard technique that can be used in Dorico to select a range of notes (click the first note, then shift-click a later note to select the range between the two). More times than not, though, when I try using this technique the first note gets unselected as if I haven’t engaged the shift key. This causes me to spend a lot of time reattempting to select my range of notes several times before getting it to work. Sometimes it never works and I have to find alternate ways of achieving what I want to do. Is there a special way to use shift-click in Dorico that I don’t understand? I couldn’t even find shift-click used in this way in the manual. Is it not supposed to work in Dorico?
I’m not sure why it sometimes doesn’t work at all. Perhaps you can give some examples of when this has happened?
If you find that you’re accidentally deselecting the first note, you can just press Undo and the note will be selected again.
If it’s just notes that you want to select, you can select the first note, Cmd/Ctrl+select the last notes and then press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+A. This is the shortcut for Select More and it should select all the notes between and nothing else.
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It happens to me all the time. It’s more likely that it won’t work than that it will. I was wondering if maybe I clicked on a bad spot, or something, but often even when I zoom in and shift-click the second note it still doesn’t work.
Thanks for the work-around suggestion. I just tried it and it does seem to work. It’s a bit complex and more time consuming than the good old shift-click routine (I’m having trouble remembering all the shortcut combinations already), but if shift-clicking isn’t going to work for me then this will come in handy!
It might be easier to select a whole bar - by clicking into it - and then extending the selection.
You can also use the System Track for making a selection, and also use Shift-Click there…
Are you experiencing this in Write mode or Engrave mode? If I’m not mistaken, Shift+click doesn’t work in Engrave mode by design (I’m not sure why but I believe there are topics about this on the forum), but it should work in Write.
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Thanks for the suggestion. I tried extending my selection, but instead of only extending forward, it extended both forwards and backwards on the score. I only wanted the selection to begin from where I selected a note, not to include notes before it.
It seems that the system track selection method selects entire bars of music, but I don’t want the selection to start from beat one of the bar, or to end on the last beat of a bar. I want the selection to start and end on specific notes.
Ok., there is definitely something flaky with your system, this works absolutely reliably here.
Yes, I’m trying to make selections in write mode. It will sometimes work, but often doesn’t. But then there are also times when I only want to select one note, but several notes get selected together. I’ll often have to spend extra time zooming in (making the score quite large) in order to select only one note head (or other object). But then, when I want to shift click to select several notes on purpose it often (but not always) won’t let me. It’s just very finicky.
I had the exact same issue. For what it’s worth, I renamed preferences.xml in Library-Application Folder-Steinberg-Dorico to preferencesOLD.OLDxml, re-opened, and it now works properly (selecting between two objects by holding shift).
- D.D.
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Thanks for showing me/us that other conversation, Alberto-Maria, and thanks for sharing your experience with me robjohn99. I’ll try replacing the preferences file. I’m not thrilled about doing that because I’ve already created a lot of customized key commands and saved a lot of defaults as I’ve been learning Dorico and there’s no way I’ll be able to remember all of that. So there will probably be another long period of re-customizing in store for me. FWIW, I always used to have similar problems with Finale. Every time I had some quirky behavior, the support people would tell me to throw away my preferences. It got to the point where I’d rather live with quirky behavior than throw away my preferences again. Still, I’ll give that a try here when I get back to working on my project.
The preferences.xml file only saves the application-wide preferences from Edit > Preferences. Key commands, defaults, and options are stored in different files.
Oh, that sounds promising. I’ll look into this. Thanks for the info!
Thanks for telling me about how not all preferences get changed. I just removed the preferences.xml file from my library and it does seem to have resolved the issue (at least, it hasn’t acted up during the minute or two that I tried it out). Also, so far the only preferences I’ve noticed reverting to factory settings are colors. Hopefully nothing more important than that was lost. I’ll just have to wait and see as I get back into working with Dorico if any other settings were lost. I did try a couple of my customized key commands and they do seem to be working(!).
Try going to the Note Input and Editing page of Preferences and make sure that the Drag threshold slider is not dragged all the way to the left.
If you don’t keep the mouse absolutely still when you Shift+click, Dorico can interpret the click as the start of a drag if the drag threshold is set to 0. So try increasing the value of the slider a little, and try again.
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Ah-ha! Thank you for this information! I had already forgotten about this preference, but now that you mention it I do remember messing with it at some point. I just experimented with it and got the results you describe.