The Plugin Mechanic

Geek-o-meter: 1 2️⃣ 3

Ever since driving my first car with automatic transmission, my life has not been the same. The best thing is that I never worry about which gear I am in and what I should switch to. The process takes care of itself. Rarely in life such things happen that are easily identifiable to instantly make life instantly much better. One such equivalent for my music-making was when I discovered this little plugin called “Exchange Staff Content”.

Introducing: Exchange Staff Content

Have you met? If so, this might come as no surprise. This gem takes whatever two staves you have and switches them around. Before discovering it, I was manually copying one staff’s content onto an empty staff, moving the other item up to the first position, and then transferring my ‘clipboard’ staff content to the second staff. If all staves were occupied I had to search elsewhere in the score to find a suitable place to put it that hopefully had the same time signatures as I was copying!

With this plugin invoked, the entire clipboard process occurs without my awareness, affording me more time to focus on the music. Like an automatic transmission, it depresses the clutch and rearranges things internally, and please, let's not extend this analogy further. For an even smoother ride, click that little 'Don’t show this dialog again (this session)'.

If you are new to this, then you’re welcome. You are gonna be coasting on the surfboard of music notation. This feature, present in many plugins, can save you precious seconds that add up throughout the day.

The catch? Well, not that this is a bad feature—on the contrary it is great! There are just two caveats to consider: First, this setting only lasts for the current session—meaning, until Sibelius quits. In my case, this has been particularly frustrating on those projects with that one Sibelius version that kept crashing. You could check all the correct boxes and fly away with all your shortcuts but when the app crashes, you need to do it again. Second, sometimes it’s called ‘Don’t show’, while other times it’s called ‘Show’, depending on the plugin.

My solution? Figure out the correct setting you want and pop the hood! (Pardon the continued hammering on the car analogy.)

Edit Plugins

We're going to navigate to File ➜ Plugins ➜ Edit Plugins. Here, we need to locate 'Exchange Staff Contents' and click on 'Edit'. I'm not a programmer, so I couldn't tell you much about what's going on, but generally, you can get an idea of what you can manipulate in the 'Data:' window. Here, we want to change the default behavior of what the plugin is doing.

Locate 'dlg_fDoNotShowDialog' and click 'Edit'. It should currently be set to 'false', indicating that the option to not show the dialog is not selected. Using our mechanic skills, we'll change this to 'true', meaning that the default behavior is set to not show the dialog. In other words, instead of needing to manually select the 'Don't show' checkbox, it will now be automatically checked and the dialog will not appear.

Close all dialog boxes and run the plugin again.

Now, all you need to do (and I do mean need to do!) is assign a shortcut to the plugin and turbocharge your productivity.

Macros and Tuning

First of all, think about all those little checkboxes you might tick one too many times per session. For me, it was the choice of showing a dialog box and the trace windows. The trace window is the confirmation window that appears after the plugin has completed to let you know how it did. Sure, we all want to show off what we did, but as far as computers go, I don’t really care.

As you can see with this plugin, we can adjust the default setting for showing trace windows under 'g_fDoTrace'. If you want a particular setting to be the default, you can change 'true' to 'false' or vice versa. For example, maybe you want the plugin to always make octave adjustments. Go to 'dlg_fOctaveAdjustment' and edit the default to be 'true'.

These small tweaks allow you to execute a plugin the way you want with a shortcut and continue your work. If you, like me, use plugins as part of a macro, this also ensures that they execute correctly whether they have been opened previously in this session or not.

Practice

When it comes to productivity, take some time—whether it's a session, a day, or a week—to keep a handy list of all the plugins you typically manipulate with a mouse after initiation. Go through them, take screenshots, and see how you can optimize their defaults. Screenshots are incredibly helpful in navigating the Edit window, as they guide you to the correct command and whether the status should be positive or negative. Another useful trick, if you're uncertain about potential consequences, is to keep a TextEdit document detailing the changes you make.

I've found that not all plugins retain changes when Sibelius is restarted, and some only retain some of the changes. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find consistency in why this happens. Conduct your own experiments, and who knows, maybe one day you'll have built yourself a Lotus Seven.