Some time ago, I saw the video with the piano-roll improvements, and I was like «Fantastic, finally we have something more FL-Studio like, and editing velocities will be easier.» But now I got the chance to test it, and I was rather disappointed by the fact that unselected velocities are still affected by the pencil tool when they are not on the same horizontal position (chord, basically) with the selected ones. So one cannot “draw” a curve for a given voice because you will change the velocities of other voices too; you must go slow, note by note.
I have no idea what’s the reasoning behind this choice, but I can tell you that I hate it.
If you turn on IRV you can see each voice separately, and edit each voice’s velocity separately. Even if you then turn off IRV it’ll still retain the velocities.
That’s what I was doing before the new features, but the whole point of better velocity editing was to avoid using IRV.
I don’t know, I guess that’s still the way to go then, especially since you don’t even need to select anything.
I still would suggest a different method of editing.
Also because with IRV you can’t see the velocities of the other voices in the background, which would help a lot.
Update 20/08: and also because if you record the CC64 pedal in IRV, it records it to the unavailable “main instrument”, and so it doesn’t play back until you switch back from IRV, which makes it a pain. See Recorded sustain pedal CC doesn't play when Independent Voice Playback is on - #15 by andrea-calligaris
I refer you to the Dorico 4 Version History PDF, on page 19:
With the line or pencil tools active, as you drag across a series of velocity bars, if no velocity bars are selected at that position, the resulting edit will apply to all notes at that position, but if one or more velocity bars is selected at that position, the resulting edit will only apply to the selected notes at that position.
What this means is that if you want your edits in the velocity editor to affect only the notes of one particular voice, you should select those notes (e.g. using a filter for a particular voice) before you use the pencil or line tool in the velocity editor. You’re welcome!
No, you didn’t carefully read my OP. That only works when the notes are like chords. But when you have something like this:
and I select all the notes of the first voice, the velocities of the notes highlighted in red will still be affected (and they shouldn’t).
Thinking about it, and since even you expected it to not work like that, it’s more likely that it is a bug rather than a design decision, because it’s really a terrible behavior.
I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken, Andrea.
As you can see in this gif, I can edit the velocities for the eighth notes in the up-stem voice without affecting the quarter notes in the down-stem voice.
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Oh, ok. I’ll check again and see what I’m doing wrong.
No, I’m right, just tried again. The problem is that in your example you’re editing the top voice, so of course it works, because every v1 note has a v2 note in the same horizontal position, and where it doesn’t, you’re still editing v1 so of course it changes its velocity.
Try editing the second voice, the one below, and you’ll see, because that one matches my image example: in fact, when you reach the 2/8 step, you won’t have the velocity of the chord G-E of v2, but you’ll have the velocity of the note C of v1, and that velocity will be affected, and that’s where the bug lies.
Right, yes, I see what you mean. The current behaviour is correct as designed, but I can see it’s not very helpful. We’ll discuss it and see how we might improve this in future.
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Thanks. I can understand that it may allow quick editing of notes outside the selection, but it’s really not intuitive at all, and really feels like a bug. For piano music, where you basically constantly have (between the two staves) at least three voices, and sometimes even four or five, this makes it impossible to comfortably edit velocities.
This has been fixed in the latest versions.
I want to sincerely thank you @dspreadbury for forwarding the issue and all the developers for their work. This is not only fixed, but the overall editing of velocities is much improved. You are all doing God’s work here, this is the software that’s finally joining playback and notation the right way.
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Thanks for taking the time to express your appreciation, Andrea. We appreciate it!
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