If one tries to transpose selected notes by an octave by using Write>Transpose>Quality>Perfect>Interval>Octave, nothing happens.
Yet the expected transposition takes place with the intervals from Second to Seventh. What seems to be required is that “Number of Octaves” be set to 1 for Octaves only. This seems illogical to me for the following reason:
“Number of Octaves” seems to be a way for compound octaves to added to the intervals selected under “Interval”. So if “Third” is selected under “Interval”, and 1 is selected under “Number of Octaves” a tenth will result. One would expect therefore that if “Octave” is selected under “Interval” and “1” is selected under “Number of Octaves”, an octave would be added to the Octave selected and the notes would appear two octaves higher or lower.
I think this is a consequence of changes to how it was in D3.5. There used not to be an octave transposition, just a unison with a number of octaves shift. Probably still work in progress?
Thank you, Janus, but I didn’t quite understand that. Do you mean that under “Interval” the Octave was not listed in early versions, it just went Unison through Seventh? If that is the case, that system makes more sense.
In this case, as a trial user, I happened to first try an octave transposition to see how transposition worked in Dorico, and nothing happened, which is always a puzzling and unpleasant experience. I immediately started a web search to see what might be amiss. Then thought to try a different interval, noticed it worked, surmised that maybe the Number of Octaves needed to be set, as illogical as that seemed, and found out what was going on.
The octave interface was logical and worked fine in 3.5.
Whose idea was it to separate Unison and Octave in the Interval pick list? I reproduce John’s report that selecting Octave by itself leaves the number of divisions at +0/12 and the number of octaves at 0, and therefore doesn’t do anything. That at least needs to be fixed.
What was wrong with “Unison (or octave)” as in 3.5 and earlier? That made sense with the separate “Number of octaves” field.
IIRC there was a discussion about the existence, or not, of the diminished Unison, whilst there is clearly a diminished Octave. Hence the need to separate the cases.