For me,
- automatic intelligent alignment of dynamics vertically.
- the ability to render individual instruments only when they have music in a flow.
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I have had great use of both ChatGPT and Claude to hyphenate text for singing both for Latin and French. You could try it out.
Pay attention with German and Russian, they have special rules.
For example German words when splitted can change meaning, so sometimes they cannot be splitted with hyphens without altering the meaning. It’s not just about syllabification.
A reply (for those who have not already muted me) (short answer, I’m leaving for now.)
Thank you Daniel, yes correct, my suggestion was meant to be helpful and not flippant. I had no thoughts unfortunately that it would cause such a problem for anyone. I am probably not allowed to apologize anymore as it will annoy someone else so I won’t.
As an explanation, I have been involved in education, teaching, writing about, tech support (related to computers, tablets, software) for over 45 years.
On Helpdesk we usually have less than three sentences for each query coming in. We have to make a best guess about how to phrase and answer the question in a way that is tailored to who they could be, their background, just going by their wording, as opposed to giving them a link to the page in the manual or long lists of possible step-by-steps depending on what else they did not say. This is best (up to now) handled by a human not AI, which becomes obvious to them if they progress with further questions to us and much appreciated.
What we often find out during a few more email exchanges if they occur is they can be between 8 years old or 80 or over. Some are developers (of apps) and give us the code to fix the UI so it works better for them, others are using a tablet for the first time, either coming from a computer or not at all, (going into retirement or perhaps in to hospital.) Some are completely blind (we find this out if we send them a specific screenshot with an arrow to clarify) and not a text answer. Some do not know what a “reboot” is or what “swipe” means, or “Back” top left (as opposed to a left arrow). Some cannot get a tap to work (in the end we/they find out they have long fingernails and need to tap slightly differently or not poke at it, or for classical guitarists (long fingernails on one hand), they find using their other hand works better (this is what they report back to us!)
Specifically, our video demonstrations are either incomprehensible even though they know the language (we suggest the CC captions which help a lot for different regional accents), or it is not in their language (we suggest the CC and auto-translate) which they do not know about, or because of this now it is too fast to read (we suggest speed controls) or if there are key commands for these settings because they cannot use a mouse very easily (motor problems, Parkinson’s etc.) These kinds of replies are appreciated and often we are told no one else told them how.
It is difficult to turn all this experience off while here at the forum, my initial reply I gave was coming from where I am without any thought.
What I obviously did not factor in, was that what I had suggested was obvious to all and it simply did not require a workaround suggestion—that Dorico users here are probably more “normal” users (not blind, they are all computer savvy and competent in technology). This is obvious to me now.
While many queries here at the forum are obvious in the way to have answered, I can see there is a large gray area where I might get tripped up again and it offends someone. This is the first and only forum I have anything much to do with, so am unsure of etiquette, hence my second reply. I started posting because of the Finale thing last year to help the Dorico team and others here, but there are enough responding with help now.
There are a number of heated exchanges of annoyances going on in a few other threads, I do not want to be part of yet another one, so I exit.
For now, I will hope to use the forum for any Dorico problems I have and stay largely silent for now otherwise, perhaps reviewing it in a year or whenever.
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We’ll miss your contributions in these coming months, @arco. You’ve indeed been a stalwart member in assisting so many users moving over abruptly from Finale., and you’ll be most welcome upon your return. Best wishes!
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Hi Gagarin Cellist,
there are actually wonderful short videos, highlighting certain aspects of Dorico, all less than a minute, called “TipsTuesday”. That is probably, what you are looking for (look at the Shorts “TipsTuesday”).
There are also a couple of short videos about Dorico 6 improvements - these were the first videos I watched - even before I was able to “grab” the update to version 6.
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Just a little critic from here. The naming scheme of the “players instruments” is absolutely bonchers…
“4-String Bass”? Last I checked it was called an electric bass with 4 strings. “4 strings” usually written in paranthesis.
And I can never write myself to a “Tuba in Bb” or a “Bass in Bb” as it is called. When I try to the dialog directs me to the singers category.
My frustration with your naming instruments is red hot.
So I wish that you would correct this, so I don’t have to sit 5 minutes and search for an instrument I could have found in 1, if you had been so kind as to use the normal spoken reference word for it.
Hello Charsten,
“languague”,
I mean which language have you chosen for your instrument names? Sometimes, switching between languages might give you unexpected results. I also found that after .xml import into Dorico there were “new” instruments temporarily appearing in dialogs, which must have come from the import.
If you just start typing the instrument name, it will come up. Here as soon as I typed ele then Electric Bass was selected, no need to search for it:
Additionally, as of D5 this entire dialog is customizable. Just go to Library / Instruments and you can change any of the instrument definitions that you want. You can change the names to be exactly what you want, change the definitions, change the instrument family, etc.
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One way around this could be with a user-defined “exception” list. While Dorico provides the “base” (99.99%), any personal ‘ideal’ could be specified in a text file for import in Dorico. This is how I do hyphenation of ‘difficult’ words in TeX.
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If you set the instrument language to German in Preferences > General > Instrument Names
then you get Tuba and even Bass (which is a term mainly used in Switzerland) in the Brass section. The instrument names remain German even if the application language is set to English.
Oh, oh! Here’s one I keep forgetting to ask for!
Could we get the ability to set the default harmonic to 4th harmonic instead of the octave?
For those of us who write for orchestra we mostly write for orchestral strings, and thus mostly require the artificial or natural 4th harmonic. None of the strings in the orchestra actually use an 8ve artificial harmonic.
It would just be nice to press on the button in the lower panel for harmonic and have it automatically give a 4th, rather than an octave which then forces us to cycle through available nodes until we get to the 4th. It would be a tiny time saver. nothing major, but still a quality of life improvement.
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Yep. That was on my list as well (scroll up to six days ago). Never would use an octave partial-that doesn’t sound possible to me as a former violinist, but maybe there are strings that can do it?
My other big one: better accidental management. I was fixing a ton of accidentals in a new work of mine; in multiple measures, there could be four 16ths with Gb followed by 12 16th notes of F#. That makes no sense, as well as some measures that had a Cb. I managed to filter those notes and respell them, but I do wish there were something like (sorry about this…) Finale’s menu bar item to “prefer sharps” or “prefer flats” to just be able to select all notes in a muddled section and have a consistent spelling.
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