Hi! Brand new user here. Switching from Finale, being very enthousiastic.
HOWEVER. I ran into some bugs. There are three ways to go from tutti to solo with strings and v.v. (create your own ‘playing technique’, just add text or via ‘divisi’) but none of those seem to get the playback right. Wanting a proper playback, I tried a workaround via “change instrument” (mid stave). Now this works great for flute/piccolo, but voor group violins/solo violin I ran in a lot of trouble visually (although playback is fine!).
First look at above screenshot! Wow. Just wow.
Furthermore I can get, in some cases, get one or two notes correctly to alter from tutti to solo and v.v.:
However, once I do more than one bar, or take some different notes (it seems to be quite random which notes are allowed and which are not), it won’t do the instrument change and just shows two separate staves:
If I do exactly the same with flute/piccolo (copy pasted the notes, same actions), everything seems to be alright.
The big differences of course being:
Having a group instrument (violins) and a solo instrument (solo violin) within one “player” (made a solo player and put a violin in there and then moved it to Violins I)
The violin I having a brother Violin II
So my question is basically:
How do I report this?
Do I just wait until solo/tutti is properly supported in Dorico, including proper playback? Or does anyone has another good workaround? (I googled for hours!). (I don’t need them at the same time, tutti and solo always alternate.)
To report a problem, all you have to do is post it here. Members of the development team, myself included, are here every day, and we read every thread on the forum, even if we don’t reply to every one of them.
The problem you show with the staves becoming misaligned sometimes happens when you adjust the vertical spacing of staves in Engrave mode, though I’m not sure under what circumstances it actually happens. You can fix it by resetting the spacing of that frame using Engrave > Staff Spacing > Reset Selected Frame.
To obtain correct solo/sectional playback for a string section, I think your best bet is to use separate voices, which you can do either in conjunction with the divisi feature if you want your soloist to appear on a separate staff, or not, if the music alternates between a soloist and the whole section on the same staff. Please read the section on independent playback of voices in the Dorico 3 Version History PDF, which you can download here.
Hi! Good to know that you are reading here. Thanks for your reply.
Misalignment:
I never went to engraving. Your solution does not solve the misalignment. I included the test score in the original posting, you can try.
Solo/tutti:
Independent playback looks promising. However: I have already two voices for divisi of the tutti violins in my (imported) score. As far as I can see, that is a problem. Also, when trying out on a simple test score: I got lost in a forest of complexity, exactly the thing I was fleeing away from with Finale.
I really do hope that solo/tutti will soon become as normal and easy as pizz/arco. Shouldn’t it be a very basic part of a notation software package as advanced as Dorico?
Ah, the reason that resetting the staff spacing doesn’t fix your project is that you’ve somehow managed to assign multiple instruments to a section player, which is not supposed to be possible. This is another reason why attempting to use an instrument change to handle the change between solo and sectional playback isn’t the right approach. I’d be interested to know if you can remember how you managed to add the second instrument to the section player, since we try to prevent you from doing that.
The issue with solo/tutti playback is, I agree, more complicated than it would ideally be. Dorico would ideally understand what each divisi change specifies, so that simply creating a divisi with a single solo section would be sufficient to change the playback. This is something that we will address in a future version, though I cannot say when.
It’s on my laptop, not on the desktop, so from the top of my head: I seem to remember to right click the instrument and choose something like “move instrument to another player” where all the players were listed, including sections.
Hope to help you out with that. Too bad that solution is off the table.
Thank you. I agree with the change you are suggesting. I really hope it comes soon. Solo sections in orchestra scores are very common. God luck with the development. Even though I am just an amateur with ONE project that I work on very rarely, I think I will buy Dorico. (Currently in trial.)
However I read that there is a dongle involved. The installation process was already painful (reminded me of the nineties with downloading software donwloading another downloading software, having to choose the right files to download manually, etc), and dongles are another thing we learned already in the nineties are a VERY bad idea. They break, get lost, they are in the wrong computer at the wrong time, etc etc etc. That is what stopping me from buying it straight away. I prefer much more an Adobe approach: buy or rent, work anywhere. They make specialists’ software too. I guess you are very much afraid of cracking. If we learned anything about fear from cracking: cracking helps too make good software spread very fast and this does increase sales in the long run when people decide that they cannot go back.
I will be using it on desktop and laptop. Desktop multiple screens and good sound, laptop for working outdoors. Standard, I would say most composers will do the same.
There’s really no point in grumbling about the dongle - it will be replaced by something better in the future; there’s already a team at Steinberg working on it. It’ll take as long as it takes, though.
As you wish. But, as Leo wrote, it’s another team (than the dream team that’s developing Dorico and that answers threads in this forum), so you might as well try and write to Steinberg directly… Daniel has made it clear that this matter is absolutely not in their hands.
