This is my second issue with condensing not actually condensing. I think the problem is that something gets hidden in a measure that breaks condensing. I’ve been troubleshooting and the problem ends in measure 48. Even when measures 1 - 47 are completely empty, they will not condense. And when I take the contents of measures 1 - 47 and copy/paste them in any other instrument, that instrument does condense.
My conclusion is that something is completely hidden. I have voice colors on. Nothing shows up in any additional voice. I’ve moved (repositioned) the whole rests up and down in each of the “empty” measures 1 - 47 in case they are hiding an errant hidden rest underneath but can find none.
I’m determined to find this! What are best practices for logically troubleshooting a condensing issue in what appears to be completely empty measures? I would prefer not to delete the clarinets and do them all again from scratch!
If you don’t mind, the best practise would be to post your project here (or at least a shortened version up to bar 50). If you are concerned about copyright, you can change notes and text items beforehand.
Someone will tell you, what’s happening - and this very reason should then get onto your condensing check list for future projects.
Something that I find helps is to start deleting chunks of music (for example, when reducing the project in order to upload) and see if things change. You may be able to narrow down the bars where things are going wrong and figure it out for yourself.
In my experience (and I’ve messed this up more than once), it’s often a gradual dynamic or tempo change (without a helpful visible extension line) that’s extending into empty bars. Or a lyric syllable that originally spanned a longer melisma. Lyrics syllables ‘secretly’ also have a rhythmic value, that can get out of sync with the notes above when you edit stuff.
It’s mundane once you find the culprit, but I know it can be puzzling.
I opened the file on my iPad - that’s why I can’t see the condensing.
But: you have manually inserted bar numbers (bar 10, bar 20 etc.).
If you delete them, does condensing sort itself?
Btw., absolutely fantastic music!
Yep, it’s often some tiny thing like a stray hairpin or something. To OP’s question, I know this isn’t helpful to call it a best practice for something after the fact when troubleshooting, but having learned such things on prior projects, moving forward on new projects my best practice has been to be mindful of these while I’m writing to avoid it downstream, keeping things tidy and consistent as I go usually prevents a lot of condensing issues.
Otherwise sometimes messing with the notation options for condensing can make or break Dorico’s decision to condense something or not, so when in doubt I’ll play around in there.
And finally sometimes I force condensing under the engrave menu - which doesn’t always work, but usually it does.
I think it would be great in a future update if Dorico could somehow have a “condensing checker” just like a spell checker… you could search the document to show you anything which is preventing Dorico from condensing.
The problem is that you have local key signatures in the clarinet staves right at the start of the flow, and although they appear to be the same, in fact one is a major key signature and the other is a minor key signature. If you make sure the key signatures match (e.g. by copying and pasting the one from clarinet 1 to clarinet 2) you will find that the instruments can condense.
@dspreadbury
THANK YOU! I should have caught that! But what I hadn’t yet learned, and now know thanks to you, is that by selecting a key signature on the staff, Dorico tells me exactly what it is at the bottom of the window.
You made my day!
@k_b
It didn’t make a difference. But a Steinberg guy found the issue! Embarassingly straight-forward: one key signature was major, the other was minor!
Thanks for taking a look for me!
