So, the little blue instrument names that show up when scrolling through Galley View are a big help in orienting oneself, but I’ve only just noticed that they show the player/layout names AND the instrument names. It’s definitely helpful to know sometimes, but many other times (like when, e.g., I do actually know pretty intuitively which player is doubling which instruments), it would be more helpful to see just the instrument names. It can just be a lot of text to scan through at such a small size and light color. See what I mean? That’s a lot of “flute.”
You could temporarily rename the player to something shorter (in your example @MarcLarcher, maybe “Perc”) whilst you’re writing; if you want, you can reset the player name later and it’ll return to its default.
I’ve been thinking about this. But I wouldn’t know if I’m writing on the good instrument ! One of the beauties of Dorico is that we can assign different instruments to a player, but obviously it becomes very difficult to handle when this player has five or more instruments (which is the case for half of my orchestra here — all the wind players have between 2 and 10 instruments !!!)
I’ve rest my case. I’ve chose a logical order for them, so that I approximately know if I have to alt-n or alt-m to move my notes to the right instrument. But I do approve snakeeyes’ idea, as it would be easier to work in galley view with the last part of the name only (optionally, because I understand the default, which in normal conditions is totally fine).
What I meant is, if you rename the player to “Perc”, the label you see in galley view would be “Perc” followed by the corresponding instrument on each staff, e.g. “Perc: Bass Drum” or “Perc: Tam-tam”. It wouldn’t remove the instrument name, just shorten the player name.
