Suppressing Tempo Object Playback

Dorico
1

Hi,

This might seems like a pretty counter intuitive thing to do, but it would be really great if there was a tickbox somewhere in the depths of Dorico with the option to set Suppress playback as the default behaviour for any newly created tempo objects, not imported by MIDI. Please consider this scenario:

  1. I Import a MIDI file into Dorico for orchestration, which includes a constantly varying tempo map, as the composer was writing to picture
  2. I want all of these MIDI imported tempo markings to be hidden on the score, as there are absolutely loads of them, and sometimes the speed only changes by fractions of a bpm. The players don’t need to see all of this! But, I would like the playback of Dorico to secretly follow them.
  3. I now manually go through inserting additional tempo objects, such as rit… lines using shift-T at key points in the piece, where I deem appropriate for ease of players reading the score in a session environment.

Now, if I hit play on my score the playback goes a little crazy, as all of the newly added tempo objects are chucking out tempo information of their own, as well as the originally imported MIDI! I must manually go through every tempo object I’ve added in my score checking the ‘Suppress Playback’ box, and it can be all too easy to miss just one, which can then cause a significant “what the…?!” moment later down the chain when exporting a MIDI file from Dorico to Pro Tools to set up for a recording session…! I then have to hunt through and find the tempo object I’ve missed clicking ‘Suppress Playback’ on.

I’m aware this is a rather niche situation, but some kind of tick box that one could tick effectively saying: “Please by default always play MIDI tempo markings, but suppress playback for user-inputted tempo objects” would be glorious, and means one less thing can go wrong in our workflow chain! Thanks for considering.

Wes

2

I wonder whether this is the kind of thing that could be handled by a macro of some kind? Or at the least you could perhaps set up a custom key command that will activate the ‘Suppress playback’ property, so you could hit a shortcut after creating the new tempo to suppress its playback while it’s still selected? The string you’d need to define in the JSON file would be:

UI.InvokePropertyChangeValue?Type=kEventMuted&Value=true

If you look for one of Leo’s posts about editing the key commands JSON file directly in a text editor, it should hopefully become reasonably clear what you should do with that string!

3

…such as this one.

4

Thanks guys - I’ll definitely look into this.