extensive sound library expression maps vs. just using Note Performer (opinions sought!)

PaulWalmsley · June 8, 2020, 7:49am

mducharme:

For instance, scrolling vertically in the piano roll in Cubase is done with the mouse scroll wheel. Scrolling horizontally is done with Shift and the scroll wheel. In Dorico, these are exactly the opposite - the scroll wheel scrolls horizontally and Shift + the the scroll wheel moves vertically.

One of the main things I would like to see is a better design of the piano roll view. Dorico’s piano roll view does not give a tall enough viewport so you have to scroll vertically much more often than you do in Cubase. In Cubase, the piano roll for the selected MIDI event appears in a pane in the bottom of the screen, or you can double-click on the event to open it in a popup window. In Dorico, the lack of vertical space means that you have to do a lot more scrolling. This is further impacted by how tall the piano keyboard is on the left hand side. In Cubase, the piano keyboard is shown as a nice small size by default which reduces scrolling greatly vs Dorico, where all the notes are extremely tall. The rectangles that let you change velocity are also a bit on the wide side in Dorico which can make editing more awkward in dense passages.

Where possible, we have modelled the UX of Play Mode in a similar way to Cubase. There are some constraints though that are more difficult to work around. The scrolling behaviour is controlled by the underlying Qt framework and that’s harder for us to override to work in the other way, but it’s something we may look at in the future.

There are some other things though that do work like Cubase:

Shift-G/shift-H to vertically resize the current lane (unfortunately ‘G’ in Dorico is used for note input so we can’t use G/H for horizontal resize, but you can do this with Z/X)
Drag the bar/beat ruler vertically to zoom in or out
Change the vertical scale of the piano roll. In Cubase there’s a scaler control in the scroll bar, but in Dorico you can shift-drag the piany keyboard vertically to rescale.

We do hope to add support for multiple automation lanes in the future.