I am noticing a great number of “small” things have been implemented—many of which were just talked about on the forum recently. I have to suppose this was just foresight on the part of the developers, and not last-minute add ins, but there is simply no room for doubt: @dspreadbury et. al. have been listening.
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Another small change that I love is the Toggle View Type keycommand.
You wouldn’t think it would be that hard to remember the keycommands for Galley and Page, but I seem to always select the wrong one. Now with the toggle, it will always switch to whichever view I’m not currently on.
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I’ve assigned the alias “vm” (“view mode” — easier to type than “vt”) to call it in the jump bar.
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Snapping system breaks to bar lines saves so much time, as does quickly moving bars to the system above/below. But as others have said, when I’ve used the upgrade for a bit more time, there will be dozens of features that will seem indispensible.
I use it so often I used shift-~, as it’s similar in my mind to hiding hidden objects in Engrave mode
Stealing this excellent idea 
I’ve started a thread to encourage people to share useful alias ideas here: Share your useful Jump Bar Aliases
So far it hasn’t generated much action but I think that’s just because it got shuffled way down last night.
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Staff Group Labels & Instrument Filter overlays are the top 2 features for me.
I’m still overwhelmed - in an extremely good way. It is going to take me a while to identify three favorites. I was always an insert mode user, and with the changes I see some major speed ups. One example is in trying to write to an exact frame, or clock time. I owe whom ever came up with the idea of “just enter notes and the time signatures will adapt accordingly”, well… something.
There are features or changes that I want to use just because I think the result is cool or where my inner child wants to play (like transformations). Some where I see how bits of efficiency and logical improvement will accumulate together (Instrument filtering, Jump Bar… ) But then then there are some completely unexpected, mic drop / jaw hanging completely-out-of-the-box solution moments. The histogram related editing is one. I feel like that may be a game changer all on its own.
Yes, the histogram is amazing! But one has to be careful to set it to selection (I think that should be the default)
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I would be hard pressed to choose only three favourite new features!
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I think the reason is because it’s so amorphous. Everyone will have totally different needs. I’ve already set jsw to be “Swap Voice Order,” but how many other users would actually benefit from a key command for that? Personally, I’m pretty thrilled with my little list of custom aliases, but no one else would have a similar list I think.
Good point, Dan.
BTW, for those of you using Dorico on more than one computer, are you keeping the jump bar aliases synchronised between them? If so, how are you doing it, manually or by copying a plist file?
Manually. There doesn’t seem to be a way to manage these, short of copying whole folders between machines.
I haven’t compiled a large list; I’m going to let it grow organically.
actually one that’s not on the main list but I would rate pretty high might just have to be the option when loading a second project to do so without enabling playback. The amount of time I’ve had to waste previously in switching between versions of a project, to copy/paste material for instance is now a thing of the past.
I find it interesting that, whereas the Key Editor being available in Write mode is, quite rightly, highly rated, the new Play window isn’t. I’m wondering whether that is because folk are not wholly convinced by this flagship feature or is it simply that it’s not really finished (we know that as well as restoring the old Dorico 3.5 CC lane features, there are more goodies to come) so a cautious “wait and see” attitude is prevailing. Or – just possibly – that there are so many other great features that 97% think that at least three of these are even better.
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A few really appreciated smaller features …
- The Sketch instruments are really neat. Sure you could manually do that before mostly, but this is just handier and cleaner. Along with a bugfix for Woodwinds, if the Percussion could change to a multipercussion instrument though that would be nicer
- The Library menu with all of those settings together is really making life easier!
- Look and feel is better IMO
- And TEMPLATES!!!
My mostly overlooked but absolutely neat feature: automatic replacement of non existing glyphs with the default Bravura ones.
For me that means 2 things:
- I can use more of the MTF Fonts for contemporary music
- I can start with my own font without any pressure, substituting glyph after glyph…
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As a composer who writes almost exclusively for publication, Dorico 4 comes close to being the perfect tool for me. Especially since decent audio renderings of my works are very important. The flexibility of the VST usage possibilities to choose sounds makes me almost giddy with delight🙂
Another overlooked tiny time-saver - “v” to change voice. Totally brilliant.
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