At the moment in Sibelius if you want to swap the contents of a marked passage between two staves you have to do something like:
Copy staff 1 and paste it into an empty staff.
Copy and paste staff 2 to staff 1
Copy the contents copied to the empty staff to staff 2
Delete the contents of the empty staff.
I find I have to do this quite often . For instance in a passage involving horns 1 2 and 3, I usually have Horn 3 playing higher notes that horn 2. But if I copy the passage to trumpets I either have to do the swap as above, or else copy the three horn parts individually so that horn 2 goes to trumpet 3 and horn 3 goes to trumpet 2.
Will there be a simpler way to do this in Dorico by selecting two staves and simply swapping the contents?
P.S. I never know whether I should use
staff / staffs
staff/ staves
stave / staves.
As a kid at school I was taught the third example, but I see so many differing usages that I don’t know, even at the age of 74, which is musically technically correct!
I rarely use plugins. There are so many of them and by the time I have found the one I want I could usually have achieved the desired result much faster.
The only ones I use regularly are those such as cresc/dim and harp gliss which can’t really be achieved in any other way.
I also use ‘players required’ which was written by Bob specially for me to discover in a large score exactly which percussion instruments I have used. and how many players are necessary.
I don’t want to use this forum as another Sibelius support forum, but in Sibelius you can select stave 1, copy it on to the windows clipboard (Ctrl+C), select stave 2, Alt-click over bar 1 of stave 1 one to paste the contents of stave 2, select stave 2 and copy using Ctrl+V to paste the contents of stave 1. No empty stave is required.
I don’t know what Dorico will have, but multiple clipboards of some sort would be extremely useful.
Yes I do use that method as well, but there are times when I want to see what I’m copying. It’s all too easy when using ctrl V to discover that you’ve accidentally copied something else in the interim…
I agree about the desirability of multiple clipboards.
In this case, the plugin is by far the easier method. It seems silly to refuse it merely because it IS a plugin. Just think of it as a function, in a menu in Sibelius.
I agree up to a point, but there are so many plugins, literally dozens. It’s not always clear what they do. You can’t prioritize the ones you might want to use. I might want to use any one of them once in a blue moon, and I have to dive through the plugin menus on each ribbon to see if I can find one that does what I need.
No thanks. I’d rather just get on with it .
Besides which I have always felt that plugins are a cop out for things that the program itself ought to be able to do easily without them.
What for instance are (to name but a few): Rehearsal Recordings
Calculate statistics
Copy signatures to a new score
Find and fix tuplets that increase note durations
Groovy Music Markup ??!
Z respell accidentals doubles dialog
Add ficta above note
12 tone matrix
Show Handbells required
Straighten written out swing
Renotate performance
Nashville chord numbers
Add brackets to reprise script
Add tonic sol-fa
Find and replace multi filter
Distribute score info
Strummer
Match gliss line notes
Check fiist species counterpoint
Add Schenkerian scale degrees
What is where
These are but a few I could never dream of using and there are many others.
If there was a way to remove or even hide the ones I’ll never ever use then I might be a little more inclined to consider using plugins more often.
But all this is in Sibelius.
Maybe Dorico won’t need plugins at all.
Sibelius plugins were easier to find when they were all in one easy to scan menu rather than strewn across the various Tabs. But you’re still at liberty to locate your Plugins folder, create a sub-folder called “AMy Favourites” or similar (the “A” puts it at the top of the list) and put your most-used plugins in it.
As to the diversity of available plugins, and the “I don’t know what that is, do i need it?” issue - surely that’s an exciting area ripe for exploration, not something to run scared of!
To drag the topic back to Dorico - and it won’t be long now before we CAN discuss Dorico rather than speculate about it - I would be VERY disappointed if there wasn’t a scripting language. This - and the willingness of the developers to make each new feature available to it - have been the life-blood of Sibelius, as Actions are of Photoshop, Macros of Word… I’m sure Dorico won’t be left behind in this respect, even if it isn’t in the first release.
I’ve found plugins a really useful feature of Sibelius and am delighted that a similar scripting language has been promised for Dorico. They allow the user to add features which are useful to them and not necessarily anyone else. Imagine the clutter if Sibelius shipped with all available plugins.
They also effectively increase the number of developers of the program. Many “core” features of Sibelius started out as one. For instance, I’m pretty sure that the Transformations feature on the ribbon Sibelius 7 simply runs Bob Z’s plugins that were in the plugins menu in Sibelius 6.
Although the info regarding plugins on Sibelius website is fairly good, I do agree that categorization and navigation leaves a lot to be desired. If I want to find a plugin that does something, I usually do a Google search like “Sibelius plugin dynamics”. Perhaps this is something the developers of Dorico could give attention to when the scripting language is more fully developed. Possibly each panel/menu could have a plugin item which points to a list of relevant downloadable plugins.
As to the diversity of available plugins, and the “I don’t know what that is, do i need it?” issue - surely that’s an exciting area ripe for exploration, not something to run scared of!
I’d prefer to concentrate on writing music than waste time exploring obscure plugins! I don’t think anyone can accuse me of being unproductive with over 150 hours of music, most of it for large forces, already entered into Sibelius since it came into existence in 1998, with very little help from plugins. Back in the pre- Sibelius days I used SCORE for a while, but that was SLOW. Before that it would take me about 3 months just to copy out the parts of a large symphonic or choral work by hand.
But looking at the features already announced in Dorico it should be even easier to be productive.
That’s just it: with judicious use of plug-ins you might have added a few hours more to your (admittedly impressive) total output, since you would have spent much less time on tedious repetitive tasks. I too do use only a fraction of the available plug-ins, but the ones that I use make a difference of several orders of magnitude with my productivity. I started out pretty much on your position (“How useful can they be, really?”), but once I dove into a script-assisted workflow I found it to be so fundamentally advantageous that I started to custom-write my own plug-ins. Today I slightly regret that I did not embrace plug-ins much sooner, especially the programming part.
I’m quite happy with the speed I achieve doing things my way. I’m sure the world doesn’t need any more music from me were plugins able to speed up my output even further!
I have no problems with moving to Dorico. Sibelius 1.0 was so intuitive I picked it up in a day, and was fluent within a week Dorico promises to be even more easy to assimilate., and, from what I’ve seen, tidies up a lot of things Sibelius could never do such as different stave sizes on different pages with extra instruments on them (end of Britten’s War Requiem for example) which suddenly moves to 52 staves) or the end of my second symphony which actually needs 72 staves and has to be printed as a separate file.
Just because I don’t use many plugins, and avoid an excess of keyboard shortcuts when I can click on a menu item just as fast doesn’t mean I’m not pretty damned quick at using the program. I just input a 283 page 1 hour choral work with large orchestra in 10 days, working only mornings. Much of the time was spent trying to get the playback as realistic as possible, coping with things such as stopped harmonics, hairpins that don’t respond, glissandi, flutters etc. There aren’t enough plugins to cope with these issues. I’d use them if they existed. For me plugins are for situations that can’t be achieved any normal way.
Over the years Sibelius has become cluttered with huge amounts of stuff I don’t need such as ideas, coloured notes, arrange, explode, guitar notation, lute tablature, chord symbols, Video to name but a few.
Of course these need to be there because they are useful to a different type of user than me, but I’ve wished for a long time that there was a way of telling the program the functions I do want, and not loading all the stuff which for me is just litter, slows down the load time, and clutters the menus/ribbons with stuff I’ll never need to use. A simple checkbox list with load/don’t load options which remains in force at each startup until edited in preferences would do the trick nicely.
