Tuplets

Again, letting the user customize that would be the solution…
B.

I agree some degree of customization is a Good Thing, but the other side of the problem is what happens when a user makes a lot of mutually incompatible customizations to a software product, and then asks the original software authors to sort out the mess for them as “free customer support”!

“This program is useless, nothing works properly, I just customized it so pressing 7 gives me a 7/6 tuplet and now I can’t enter half notes…” :wink:

I know (having long followed the Sibelius forum as well), but this seems a real cop-out to me. First, we’re not talking about “a couple” key strokes over the course of hundreds of hours of work, hundreds of pages of music, or thousands of tuplets. The colon in particular is a real pain to have to type when you’re also juggling the MIDI keyboard. (At least let us use a symbol that doesn’t require holding down the shift key.) More than anything, I think I reject the idea that saving “a couple of key strokes” isn’t a very important consideration. Having to type 5:4 every time I need to engrave a quintuplet is really annoying. In 99% of music, that’s what a “5” means. The other 1% of the type, I can type 5:6.

More than that, Dorico is a program that already exhibits a real “point-of-view” in its approach to engraving — it wants to make your music conform to “best practices” as the Dorico team has codified them. So it seems a relatively obvious approach that tuplets should also try to do that by default, with the option to “force” other ratios if the user really wants it. Elaine Gould codifies note values of tuplets using two different systems (pp. 203–204). Given the hundreds of engraving options already present in the program, if you’re worried about people not liking the defaults, there could be the option to use one of the two normalized systems (e.g., 7:4 or 7:8) by default.

I’m not “worried” about this whatever the outcome - and I don’t work for Steinberg so I’m not “copping out” of anything, just expressing my opinion!

I’m hoping that eventually, if I really want to create lots of 19:14 tuplets of double-dotted 32-notes, I’ll be able to write my own macro to do that and run it with a single keystroke - without being bothered whether it’s any use to the rest of the world :wink:

Sorry, Rob, didn’t mean for it to be about you personally – I mean it’s a cop out in the general sense, not that you are copping out of anything. :slight_smile: Just trying to engage with your points.

I haven’t tried this myself, but I think you can create your own shortcut to your desired tuplet ratios. The command is:

NoteInput.StartTupletRun?Definition=4:3

It’s likely you won’t be able to edit this in the shortcut editor as it can’t deal with every function that takes parameters, but you should be able to edit the keycommands.json file that you’ll find in your AppData / Application Support folder.

Related question…

Is there a way (yet… maybe it’s coming in the future?) to hide or edit the tuplets on an individual basis? I can’t seem to figure out how to do this. I have a string of similar tuplets and I want to show the first one and hide the rest. Also, on an individual basis can you change the appearance of the tuplet to intentionally “break” the general tuplet rules that you have set up? Add or take away a bracket as needed for example.

FWIW - Add my voice to the concern about the difficulty in adding tuplets. It seems like a lot of key strokes just to get a tuplet and then to leave it. I know there are a lot of Sibelius users in here voicing their opinions from that standpoint, but as primarily a Finale guy, I want to say that the way that Finale does tuplets in Speedy Entry is WAY better. The work flow is simply, Command-3 (for a triplet), enter the notes with the rhythmic value that you want, that’s it. Finale doesn’t assume the value of the tuplet until you’ve entered the first rhythm. And once the tuplet is done writing it automatically closes the tuplet, (unless you use the caps lock key to engage the “stickiness” of it.)

Finale (Speedy Entry) - Command-3, play note on keyboard, press desired rhythm
Dorico - press desired rhythm, type “;”, type “3” (or “7:4”), type “return”, play notes on keyboard, type “:” - It’s too much.

Worked perfectly!

You can hide tuplet brackets/numbers by way of the Properties panel (Ctrl+8 to show it).

Is it possible to hide all tuplet brackets? I have not found this option…

You can change the default options for showing tuplet numbers and tuplet brackets on the Tuplets page of Engraving Options.

Loff56’s question still remains: In a series up tuplets, how does one show numbers for the first couple and for none after that? Deselecting them one by one isn’t really an option and deselecting them all in Engraving Options isn’t either.

The answer is that you would select the tuplets whose numbers/brackets you want to hide, and hide them with Properties. I’m not sure why you consider selecting them and setting properties not an option, given that it’s reasonably easy to select a bunch of them at once and then simply change a single property.

In a passage with not only a series of tuplets but all kinds of other elements like slurs and dynamics, how one would select only the tuplets in that region? For one thing, you have to do this in Galley View, as drag-selecting a contiguous group over several systems in Page View seems impossible. For another, you can’t drag-select tuplet numbers above and below the staff without selecting everything else, so you have to Cmd-click all the tuplet numbers one by one. A logical choice might be the possibility of selecting the first tuplet number and then shift-clicking the last one to select all the ones in between. This would be a handy program-wide feature for selecting all elements of a certain type in a region.

In Brackets options, “show tuplet brackets”, I have 2 options : “Show only when necessary” and “always show”. Is it possible to add “never show”? Thanks a lot for your job!! :slight_smile:

Dear Vaughan,

this comment is supposed to follow your comment…

Or implementing a filtered selection… but I think this option is already in the pipeline, isn’t it ?

I certainly hope so. This could conceivably aid a number of operations involving other types of objects. In any case, this would be the best way of dealing with the tuplet situation I already described but which wasn’t really addressed. It’s not uncommon to start a long passage of tuplets with the first few showing and the rest not, since it’s no longer necessary to keep stating them and it reduces clutter. In Dorico, the current methods are either to remove the redundant tuplet numbers one by one or to change the default not to show tuplets at all and then to change the first few in the properties panel to show the numbers. The first option will take a lot of work and the second removes all tuplet numbers in an entire document, making it’s easy to miss seeing them when proofreading if you do want them to show.

+1 for the filtering option, but this I am also sure is already worked on.

I changed the default not to show the numbers and tried to activate them in the first bar of my piece only. I did not find the option to show them - not in write and not in engrave mode, activating beams, single notes, group of notes, all together. How do I do this - or did you just assume that this is possible?

Thanks!

It almost seems like Dorico ignores the tuplet when you hide the number in engraving option. The tuplet options are indeed gone. Also - if you copy eight note tuplets without the number, they paste as normal eight notes :confused:

Daniel,

Is there way to hide «both» numbers and brackets?..
…as «camouflage» use in case of 6/8 against 2/4 as shown here !
Capture d'écran 2016-12-22 12.35.36.png
Of course will be easier when Dorico will support real independent time signature.

Thanks for tips.

Dorico is simply wonderful !