I’m finding myself spending a significant amount of time with my part prep trying to line up dynamics. Hairpins aren’t lining up with dynamics, and generally I’m spending more time than I’d like having to tweak things manually. I’m using ‘group dynamics’ as a kind of reflex now, but that inevitably means having to ungroup things when I want to move them. Any top tips for getting dynamics to behave a little better? Thank you - I realise this is a fairly general question, but it’s a fairly general problem.
Also, while I’m here, ‘group dynamics’ is often causing Dorico to crash. Especially when trying to group dynamics over stave breaks. I’m using noteperformer, in case that’s relevant.
Well, to put it short: That’s how Dorico works. 
If you find yourself grouping dynmics everywhere to make them line up, you might have missed something at the entry stage of your dynamics: When you put something like “p<f” into the popover, those will be grouped automatically, thus aligning from the very first entry. When you then duplicate this group to other players, they also will be grouped (and linked) together.
So normally (given that you know your “groups” when you enter them) you only will have to un-group some dynamics when you encounter some special cases.
Thanks. This is fine in theory, but generally speaking, there are quite a lot of instances where the results are just a mess, and I’m ending up moving things around a lot - now, moving things around a lot is fine, I’m a long-time Sibelius user, and had to spend ages doing this in Sibelius. But I’m finding my part-prep time is being taken up with fixing this issue. I was wondering whether there was an ‘align’ command or something I didn’t know about, that could horizontally align the dynamics, without making them grouped.
That’s interesting: I’m coming from Finale where I had to “move things around a lot”, too. But in Dorico this has gone down to almost zero, because Dorico works pretty well in this regard.
Can you give us an example of where Dorico fails to do its job?
I’ve got loads in my current score, mainly around hairpins and dynamics. I’m also finding generally I’m having to spend less time manually correcting things, which is why I’ve posted really. I would find the ability to be able to quickly align things (think an engrave mode thing) without necessarily grouping them (which creates dependencies between objects) quite useful. That may not be possible, and perhaps on a related note, I’d find some form of rulers helpful as well.
Here’s an example. I would like to be able to line these hairpins and dynamics up without forcing them into a group.
Hmmm…
Guessing from your example, you already have groups but want to align several groups because they are almost aligned anyway?
Yes! Exactly this - but don’t really like grouping things over line breaks, as this seems to create more problems than it solves…
I’m also seeing loads of instances of this - taking ages to fix.
I’ve changed no staff-spacing etc - the programme is running as close to default as makes no difference, btw.
Hi EmmCeeSq.
I’m sorry I do not have an actual solution to solve your problem. I personally have no problems with grouping dynamics that span through different systems, but maybe I’ve missed some problems. I’ll make sure I double check next time I do.
What I do use on a very regular basis are keyboard shortcuts. Here are the three keyboard shortcuts I created, and that I do use : shift-cmd-r to group dynamics together, alt-cmd-r to remove dynamic from group and shift-alt-r to ungroup dynamics. I find I’m no longer wasting time with dynamics. Hope it helps !
Thank you Marc! Yes, I’ve made my own shortcuts for the functions, I was just wondering whether there was a more engraving-based solution. Grouping dynamics isn’t always what I want to do, as it reduces the flexibility of being able to move individual items within a group. I think the ability to be able to align things, (as well as some on-screen rulers) would be potentially useful.
Aligning dynamics without grouping them is certainly a valid wish. F*'s alt-* (+/-) is super efficient and a good role model …
I agree that it would be helpful to be able to align selected dynamics without grouping them, and we’ll address this in a future update.
Thank you Daniel!
Right now, I am having the same problems expressed here. Oddly, in a certains spot, a grouped >pp simply does not align… yet, it aligns when I ungroup… strange… Has this alignement problem been addressed somehow? Thank you!