Single-click copying broken: how do I get Avid to respond?

[GrahamF]

I’ve used Sibelius since its Acorn days and have also tried Musescore and Dorico. For me, the quickest way to enter music - having tried the other possibilities - has usually been single-click copying in Sibelius. The closest place to find the note or symbol I want is in a nearby bar: I left click on that, and then I’ve set up my mouse so I can right click to place a copy where I want it to go (I use the middle button to access the global menu). To select a chord I double-click on it; and then my spare hand rests on the cursor keys to shift a note up or down for the few occasions when my copy isn’t in quite the right place.

For me, pointing with a mouse at the place I want a note or chord to go is far quicker than finding pitch letters scattered across the keyboard and easier than pressing extra keys to choose whether I want to add to a chord, change octave or switch to a different stave; and with single click copying any articulation marks get copied across too. It's often quicker to complete a bar - with all its articulation and expression markings and so on - and then paste it, making any changes needed, rather than starting again from scratch. But perhaps this is because I’m usually inputting piano music; and of course I appreciate everyone has their own preferred methods. I do use keyboard shortcuts (configured to get at the original dialogue boxes) for key signatures, time signatures and lines and so on, but I’m sure many people do that.

Unfortunately single-click copying has become broken between Sibelius 7 - where it worked perfectly - and the 2024 versions of the program. Attempting to paste a note an octave away from the original produces the original pitch again at best, even when I paste onto a different stave, and often produces an enharmonic version of the original - Ab pasted an octave down becomes G#, for example. Further, when pasting a minim into the last beat of a 3/4 bar, say, the two resulting tied notes are usually different from each other - the first one always matches the pitch of the source note regardless of where you point, while the second has the octave bug just mentioned.

I’ve posted about this on the Avid community forum, but there hasn’t been a single response, nor any recognition of the bug from Avid, so I’d be grateful for any advice from any members here about how I can maximise the chance of getting this fixed. I know other people use single-click copying, but perhaps they’ve all stuck with Sibelius 6 or 7.

I only bought the 2024 version of the program because version 7 doesn’t work with newer Apple computers, and I never asked for things like a revised colour scheme, a resizable keypad or a new inspector (or, indeed, the ribbon along with its incomplete dialogue boxes that are worse than what went before), particularly as the various changes have broken a core function of the program.

Do we now have to accept that most long-standing bugs will never be fixed, and ‘improvements’ will generally be visual ones made without a proper understanding of their effect on the rest of the program code? I’ve never met another application where something as fundamental as the copy and and paste function was broken for users who paid more money to upgrade, and I’d have considered it a matter of integrity for Avid to fix it as quickly as possible.