Decrease velocity contrast works odd

[Mark W]

Hello NotationUser,

An alternative to clean this up "proper" would be simply not allowing to perform this operation on single chords

In other words check for at last two timing positions to enable the buttons.

That type of solution is very common among software programs out there. I think it is a bad solution!

It's a bad solution because there is no feedback. The button is disabled. The user sees that and wonders why? There is nobody there to tell him why the button is disabled.

The guideline in Notation products is that options are disabled only if it is intuitive to the user why they are disabled. Otherwise, the user can choose the option and then learn via a message, often in the status bar area, why the operation isn't allowed.

There is a work-around I could implement in Composer but, again, this problem is not sufficiently important for me to spend time on. I really shouldn't be spending any more time discussing this problem. But I can't resist.

If you copy/paste the single chord into three adjacent locations, and select all three chords then, as we know, the contrast velocity command works. You could do that work-around, and delete the temporarily added two chords but, of course, that would be way too inconvenient!

But Composer could do the same work-around behind the scenes, essentially duplicating the chord the same way, then apply the contrast velocity logic.

That's more insight into the internal programming of Composer than I only rarely take to effort to explain. But I thought you might find that work-around idea interesting. It would take me 30 minutes to implement, which is less time than I've spent in this forum thread ;-) I'll but this usability problem / bug back on the to-do list, with a note about the above internal work-around.

Cheers
-- Mark