I often lasso select a section with dynamics in engrave mode, and then perform ”align dynamics”. After that, it is rather common that I need to adjust them a bit up or down. It would be great if the align dynamics command at the same time would end up having all the dynamics involved selected, so that I could go ahead and adjust them directly.
Generally, if you need to “align dynamics” in Engrave mode a lot (sometimes minor adjustments are needed), you’re likely using Dorico wrong. Strive to Group horizontally in Write mode all relevant and adjacent dynamics, and everything should be more or less perfectly aligned once you enter Engrave mode (if you’ve been working with note input in Galley view).
Also explore the Engraving Options for dynamic spacing if you feel that you need to move things around because of that, and that creates the need to (re-)align stuff in Engrave mode.
I just recently did a 30+ Flow live-to-picture score in one Dorico project (score+parts) and I don’t think I “aligned dynamics” in Engrave mode once.
Yes, normally that’s the way I would go – but in this case I have quite a lot of complicated condensing passages where I need to ungroup dynamics to have the condensing the way I want it. So unfortunately grouping is not the way here. It can be for instance two bars where the dynamics are almost the same – they have obviously to be different in the parts, but can be shown as the same in the score.
Having said that, I will definitely try to find a better way to achieve what I want, including as much grouping as possible.
I often find myself having to manually align the dynamics too. Also, grouping is not just a visual option; grouped dynamics behave as a chain of events, which is often not preferred. I think there might be room for an automated feature similar to Sibelius’ Magnetic Layout, but maybe I’m wrong, and Dorico already does this in a way I haven’t discovered yet. Anyway, in Dorico, I find myself manually adjusting dynamics and other markings that I rarely had to adjust in Sibelius. (That said, Dorico is still fantastic in almost every other respect!)