I am able to create a custom Tonality System and define its accidentals, and they do play back microtonally. However, the divisions for the white-note scale do not play back; Dorico always plays the diatonic scale ABCDEFG in 12edo. I’ve tried several EDOs; someone said that Dorico has problems with EDOs not divisible by 12, so I multiplied the step sizes and accidental definitions by 12. This did not help.
Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug in Dorico (making microtonal playback completely flawed)? The key signature implementation (and/or the manual) is somewhat confusing but I made my tuning system first, then checked that it’s selected in the pop-up menu and finally applied the ‘Atonal’ key signature. The popup keeps showing my Tonality System, and the accidental palette shows the correct accidentals, and they play back microtonally. Also Shift-Alt-arrow works as it should, going through the microtonal steps.
Yes, I’m afraid the implementation in Dorico 2.0 only correctly plays the notes with accidentals, but doesn’t change the tuning of notes not altered by accidentals. The good news is that we have been hard at work on this since 2.0’s release and the forthcoming update will comprehensively solve this problem. It will also use the “detune” parameter rather than VST 3 Note Expression which means that in addition to being supported by HALion, it can also play back in other VST instruments, including NotePerformer and some VST 2.x instruments (though I’m afraid I don’t know which VST 2.x instruments actually support the “detune” parameter).
Thanks, Daniel. I was afraid that it’s a limitation in Dorico but I’m very happy to hear that the problem will be solved in the next update. As of now, there are only three popular EDOs that Dorico can handle: 24, 48, and 72 - but before Dorico, playback of the the latter two was tricky due to the large number of notes.
May I make a wish: would it be possible to increase the maximum number of steps in the Divisions? If values larger than 999 were allowed, it would be possible to use 12 000 EDO, i.e. define the unaltered notes as well as the accidentals in tenths of cent. At least some VST3 instruments have this accuracy, I assume, and it would be easy to simply type in cent values with one decimal (without the point). It would do away with some noticeable rounding errors that occur when cents are used. Tenths of cent are common in microtonal software; for instance on the tuning page of Logic, intervals are defined with tenth-of-cent accuracy.
Yes, it should be OK to make the maximum value for the spin controls for defining the divisions of the octave larger. We’ll do this for the next update as well.
Until the update comes out, I and a few others have found a workaround: create a custom key signature in the new tonality system and use that to modify the “white keys.” The only issue is that hiding key signatures is difficult (or impossible) in Dorico, so I have 2 flows per project — one for audio export, and one for printing.