Cannot change play duration of long notes in Key Editor

Dorico
1


As seen in the video, in the Piano track, the new wanted duration would be reverted back once I finish editing.

Please let me know if there is any workaround to adjust the played duration without affecting notations.

2

Works normally for me in a new document. Could you please attach the Dorico project file here and we could try to solve the issue?

3

Cannot change play duration of long notes in Key Editor.dorico (1.3 MB)

Please try to change played durations of the notes in bass clef.

4

I tested this by reapplying both Auto and Noteperformer playback templates and then it works. Using the Silence playback template the issue persists. Apparently if there is no playback sound assigned, Dorico can’t change played durations…

5

In my case I cannot reapply playback template, otherwise all my manual tweaks would be lost. I modified the project by adding and routing VST manually, and then tried again.

As you can see, it still doesn’t work after assigning sounds. But it now reflects the changes I made yesterday, before applying VST, but not what I changed just now.

6

Hi @sunnych, this is an interesting problem.

After my tries I found out that this behaviour (which seems to be unexpected or even a bug) happens when you have overlapping notes: as for example the Eb3 (Eb2 in my example as I changed Dorico’s default C) in the right hand, which is the same note held by the left hand in the initial chord. Somehow this overlapping of the Notated duration, despite the automatic separation (not overlapping) that Dorico applies in the Played durations of those notes, confuses Dorico and the second note’s played duration is locked. [Possibly there is a conflict/confusion between the automatic offsets…*]

I found two ways (maybe there are other) to make the editing of the second overlapping note’s played duration possible:

  1. in key editor, just drag the played-duration-end of the first of the two overlapping notes a little bit to the left (*observe the wildly changing offsets in the properties panel): doing so you somehow unlock the second note so you can drag its played-duration-end as desired:

    CleanShot 2026-06-15 at 00.53.55@2x
    CleanShot 2026-06-15 at 00.53.55@2x1626Ă—3094 531 KB

  2. another possible way is to activate Independent Voice Playback for that track, so that you don’t have overlapping notes in the same voice, and you can freely drag the desired note’s played duration:

    CleanShot 2026-06-15 at 00.59.19@2x
    CleanShot 2026-06-15 at 00.59.19@2x1920Ă—2434 531 KB

I made a three minutes video to show this two methods visually:

7

Thanks for your kind help. It works!