Can't add bars after changing time signature to open

Hi All,

I’m having trouble with creating a bar with open time signature. When I tried to change a bar to open time signature through the shift-M popover and type “open”, the bar and all the bars that comes afterwards disappeared completely. When I tried to insert bar, it says “to add bars, first add a time signature”. This effectively makes the open time signature completely unuseable.

Am I missing something here? Or is it a bug?

Welcome.

If those bars were empty, then to Dorico they do not really exist!

If you enter music into your open bar, you can then either select any note and insert a barline, or create a new meter section.

(experiment and see what happens)

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Welcome to the forum @Midori_Yakumo – that’s right, you can’t add bars in either open meter or flows without a time signature, because the duration of a bar comes from the time signature (meaning Dorico doesn’t know how much time to create, because the unit of “a bar” is undefined).

Likewise, Dorico doesn’t show barlines automatically in open meter, but you can input barlines wherever you like.

You can still add any number of beats, e.g. enter “20q” into the Shift-B popover to add twenty quarter note beats. You can also just input notes, and once you reach the end of the flow, Dorico will just create more time to accommodate the notes you input. If you want to do this before some existing music later on that you want to preserve, you can use Insert mode.

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Ohhhh thank you! I just entered a note into the original 4/4 bar and then used the pop-over to change it into the open meter and it worked! Thank you for giving me the idea!