I have about 100 lead sheets in Sibelius that I’d like to import into a Dorico project as flows. I tried doing it this morning and a few questions/issues arose.
If I select all the files at one time, a window pops up asking about importing each file individually. IOW, I need almost 100 interactions with a dialog window while importing. Is there a way to batch import without this?
Chord symbols didn’t import for any of the charts. Is this not yet working on xml import? [Update: Mostly solved this one thanks to Derrick. See his post below. I still have at least one flow where the chords aren’t showing, despite being present in the original Sib file and the “show chords in all parts” option selected.]
Sibelius assigned an instrument to these lead sheets (often saxophone, but occasionally another instrument, depending on how the file was originally created.) Is there a way to filter this out/ignore it on import? I’d prefer to have all the flows use the same default sound (whatever it is). Can I merge them into one instrument?
Is there a preferred export setting in Sibelius or import setting in Dorico that I’m not aware of that would help with the above? (To get these XML files, I batch-converted them to uncompressed XML in Sibelius.)
Thanks!
A few things I noticed about the imports…
1st/2nd endings are inconsistently importing. Specifically, two-bar long first endings imported with the 1st bar of the ending being 1st ending and the 2nd being the 2nd ending, despite the repeat sign being at the end of that bar.
In some cases, the repeat signs didn’t import even though the 1st/2nd ending lines did.
Double barlines at the end of a system before a repeat sign aren’t importing. Double barlines at the end of a song with an ABCB form (so no final barline) are importing.
Regarding chord import: see if going to a Player in Setup and right-clicking to see if choosing Chord Symbols > Show on All Instruments (of that part) will display chords that imported but are hidden.
I have found that sometimes I have to choose Show on All Instruments twice before it will “take.”
In addition to the above questions, most of which I have not yet figured out solutions to, I’m also noticing that some of the flows have very different staff spacings from others. I’ve tried selecting the entire flow and selecting both “reset appearance” and “reset position” from the edit menu to no avail.
Similarly, some of the 1st/2nd ending brackets are appearing much farther away from the staff (higher) than in other flows, and “reset position” doesn’t help with that either.
How can I adjust these to all be Dorico’s default settings?
And, in an unrelated question, is it possible to insert text in a token with either one word bolded or in another font?
I’d need to see the project itself to be able to guess what might be going on with the placement of the repeat ending lines and the staff spacing.
It is not currently possible to insert text in a token with font or formatting changes at the moment, but I expect we will be able to enable this at some point in the future.
Can I second the usefulness (utility?) of formatting within tokens? I work a lot with musical theatre scores that have cue lines printed at the top of each number.
I’m really pleased to have discovered one can copy and paste tabs into token fields (the tab key just takes you to the next field), and the flowotherinfo token will take line breaks too, but occasionally it’s helpful to be able to have a line in italics.