Even after making sure the “Bar Rests in Additional Voices” option is checked under Notation Options, the program adds no rests at all for additional voices. The only way I can get it to work is by manually inserting a bar rest for each voice for every bar needed. Another issue I noticed is that the colors for voices seems rather meaningless in Dorico. One staff will color Up-stem Voice 1 in blue, while another staff will color the same Up-stem Voice 1 in pink and Downstem Voice 1 in blue. This is very confusing to look at. Why can’t the app color the voices consistently like in Sibelius, so you can tell by just looking at the score what is what.
On a grand staff instrument the upstem voice 1 on each staff is a different voice - hence the different colour. I’d guess this is to accommodate cross staff notes.
If bar rests are missing, either you have removed some rests, or perhaps it’s an artefact of an xml import. Either way you won’t get additional rests before the first appearance of a new voice. You can recover missing rests by resetting starts/ends voice properties.
Voices are colored according to the order of creation in each instrument. On a grand staff instrument like piano, the upstem voice 1 in the first staff is created first, and gets the “Voice 1” color, and the upstem voice 1 in the second staff is created next, and gets the “Voice 2” color.
For single-staff instruments, I think upstem voice 1 should normally always have the same Voice 1 color.
It’s a bit trickier than that: all staves start with an Up-stem Voice 1, but if you Change Stem Direction it’ll become Down-stem Voice 1 but will retain its colour.
When importing MusicXML there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the order in which voices are created.
As you alluded to earlier, the differences in voice colours between grand staves are to aid with cross-staff notation: Sibelius considers each staff as a separate instrument, then uses some pretty lousy code to do cross-staff notation, and as such cross-staff accidentals (and slurs, and tuplet brackets, and note spacing, and…) continue to be horribly buggy even 30 years into the program’s life. Dorico considers voices across the whole instrument and does cross-staff notation a lot better.
Sibelius’s voice colours are indeed consistent, but you really are limited to four voices, and the note spacing works in specific pairs (voices 1 and 2 align nicely, as do voices 3 and 4, but other combinations are a mess). Dorico’s colours are inconsistent but it mostly doesn’t matter: an unlimited number of voices can come and go freely, and will play nicely together across staves.
You do need to know which staff a voice originated on, though, or at least that the red up-stem voice 1 on the lower staff is a different voice to the blue up-stem voice on the upper staff, or there’s potential for confusion over why various up-stem notes apparently on the same staff won’t beam together, hence the colours.
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I guess I’m not really as concerned with the color of the voices as to why the app doesn’t seem to fill in bar rests when one voice drops out and doesn’t play. As mentioned, I can enter the bar rests in manually, but seems to defeat the purpose of the preference setting.
It works for me:
Can you post a screenshot or a minimal project showing what you’re seeing?
I’m basically seeing the same thing as your example, just without the bar rest for voice 2 in the second measure (unless of course I enter it in manually). It doesn’t seem to add it automatically as the option in “Notation Options” seems to imply.
Just a thought… Notation Options are Flow specific (you can have different options for each flow). Have you applied the option all your flows?
The example I posted above was just as it was entered – the rest in the second measure was added automatically by Dorico.