Welcome to the forum — and Dorico, @mikecampbell01 !
There is a way to get longer eights from your NP playback. I’ve talked about coaxing swing out of NP in a few other threads, so I just grabbed those posts:
If a group I’m writing for wants a playback demo, I even duplicate my score flow and make Played Durations adjustments in the Key Editor and add the accents and slurs that one normally omits in jazz writing to get a reasonably idiomatic performance. Believe it or not, even staid old NotePerformer can be coaxed to swing reasonably with enough effort.
@MikeInBoston , to my knowledge it isn’t possible to hide articulations directly as a properties setting.
Key Editor Workaround — Perhaps you already know all of this: One of the big reasons I switched to using Dorico a couple of years back was its Play Mode and the associated ability to affect the playback sound only in the Key Editor. (I privately sometimes call this “DAW Mode.”)
Say you have a snippet entered with just a slur, but you want some staccatos, marcatos, accents, etc.:
<a cla…
So many great uses of flows….
One thing I do in my jazz charts if I know a group would like an audio playback file is to add in as I’m working all of the slurs and articulations that one normally wouldn’t in order to coax half-decent swung playback out of, in my case, the excellent but very non-swingin’ NotePerformer.
In that (original) flow I’ll also add any staff- or system-attached text that I want as information for myself while working. (I tend to prefer “visually-forward” text over using…