Finale refugee here. I’ve searched the forum a bit but not found anything that truly addresses my issue. I write exercises for my students and myself often using the circle of 5ths as my plan. What I want to do though is start each key on a new staff with both key and time signatures. Each staff should also end with a final bar line and no cautionary key signature. This was relatively easy to do in Finale.
I’ve figured out how to “force” the key signatures at the beginning of each staff but cannot figure out how to cancel the cautionary key signature in favor of the new key sig at the beginning of the staff. Does this mean I’m going to have to write exercises using new flows or frames for each new key??
Insight appreciated!
Kerry Moffit
Dorico Pro 5
MacBook Pro - OSX Sonoma V14.5
Thanks… I’m still figuring out where to find things like this. Is there a way to hide cautionary key signatures “globally” within a particular document?
An alternative is to use a separate flow for each exercise. You can set their final barlines to be anything you want (including no barline) in Notation Options.
That way, they would be entirely independent and reorderable, if you wanted.
It seems to me that 12 flows per document would be a bit labor intensive. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I know some of the Dorico/Steinberg help representatives don’t appreciate some of the comments regarding the transition from Finale to Dorico but a few million of us are having to learn a new system as we’re working. I’m hoping the way we’ve done some things in Finale will take hold in Dorico’s programming in the future. There are things that Dorico does more efficiently or elegantly than Finale but some of the page formatting/layout in Dorico seems extremely cumbersome to me.
I don’t think so and if you make a lot of material for your students this way can have benefits for you. See it as an kind of Dorico exercise for yourself. As Lily said you can always reorder things very easy and you can also make nice flow headers, so every exercise can have a number, title or whatever.
If you know how to work with flows it is not more work.
I just completed a document with 602 flows, each one a single line of music! There was no manual effort at all: each one … flowed on from the previous one, on the same page, automatically.
There may have been some posts from grumpy users; but the Dorico team themselves are nothing but helpful, as I’m sure you’ll find out!
If you provide an example of the sort of thing you’re trying to achieve, I’m sure we can show you the best way to go about it. I’d argue that page formatting in Dorico is generally easy, and where it does require a bit of effort, that usually is at the ‘global’ level, so that it can be applied page after page, or copied to other layouts and documents.
Firstly, I’m sorry if anyone from the Dorico team has given that impression – you can trust that in the development team we always welcome feedback. We will try to encourage new users to learn how Dorico works (because using Dorico in a “Dorico” way will generally get you the best results in the long run), but if feedback reveals something we’d missed, we take that on board.
Once you’ve had a go using flows, I really think you’ll enjoy the system. But I know that it will feel quite different – it was the same for me when I first switched!
We feel your pain and want to diminish it. Some things that was very easy in Finale are complicated to achieve in Dorico (and vice versa). There are in my mind several reasons to this difference as the two programs partly try to solve different problems and of course in different ways.
I have followed the Dorico team for a long time (some of them from the Sibelius days) and one thing is very clear to me: they very much listen to the users! They save the ideas and they are often implemented. But changing software without bad side effects takes a lot of design work (my guess is that Finale had to die as it was impossible to maintain the convoluted code resulting from years of fixes, that development team listened to their users as well).
The intimate knowledge of Finale does not help in Dorico. After years and years of learning how to play one instrument, it will take unlearning to play another instrument.
The very thinking is different , not only the keystrokes. It helped me when thinkin that Finale starts with putting ink to paper (as an analogy). Dorico starts with putting semantic music into the write mode, and only later commit it paper.
One difference is that Dorico wants to “understand” every notation you enter while Finale sometimes only wanted to see what ink to put to the paper. The Dorico way really is more complicated as you need to select the correct semantic thing to enter (text comes in many variants, and Dorico wants to “understand”).
Another difference is that Dorico aims to handle the full desktop publishing work. You can enter front page, information pages, all the multi movements and end pages in the same program. As I remember it, I used to do this by importing the parts into another page layout program. This way of doing things makes it more difficult when all I want to do is create one page.
For me the “thinking” in Dorico is that the user will do about the same things several times. The first time, setting up the templates and default settings are tiresome. But once done I can reuse the settings are much easier. Instead of modifying every “object” on the page, most often a global setting will modify all the “objects” of the same type.
And, yes, some things are very difficult in Dorico that are possible or even simple in Finale.
The thing to remember is that one does not have to learn all of Dorico all at once: one initially only has to learn how to make Dorico do what each user has to do to start.
I learned that lesson a long time ago. It was when I struggled to switch from MOTU’s Professional Composer to a program called Finale in the late 1980’s.
I’ve found multiple flows quite easy to manage. The only downside is that (so far as I know) you can only select the music in one flow at a time.
But engraving, notation and layout options will affect all the flows at once (if you want them to, in the case of notation options) so it’s easy to configure things across all the flows at once.
Would you be interested in discussing some of your page formatting issues? There might be a better way to do things, or if you are hitting a Dorico limitation, some workarounds.
When I started with Dorico, this is an area that took me some time to get to grips with.
Kerry, I use Dorico to create short exercises like yours and the flows are very useful. It is very effective for exporting individual sound files, images, xml, etc and allows the exercise to be rearranged by dragging it to a new position.
