Cleaning up voices from XML files

Dorico
1

I need to verify which voice notes are in for a grand staff (piano), for over 50 Dorico projects. All music comes from MXL files, not created with voices correctly, and need to be cleaned up.

Color by voice is very handy, but hard to detect if the colors on the downstem voice 1 on one staff is similar to the other staff. (I kinda wish grand staffs had different voice numbers.) My default voice colors from 1-4 are easy to distinguish:

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But the voices came in like this:

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  1. How can I load the MXL so I’m using my default voice colors?
  2. Can I reset, or select all notes that are moved using N or M commands? I don’t see anything in the Properties panel that indicates if a note is moved.
  3. Any other advice for cleaning up such a project?
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Personally, I wouldn’t worry too much about which specific voice things are in, unless you start seeing problems (e.g., notes that won’t tie because they’re in different voices, or something like that). The basic distinction is between upstem and downstem voices, to make sure that the stems behave correctly when you’ve got multiple voices in a passage.

Remember too that Dorico will “clean up” unused voices for you when you save a file. So if you enter notes only in upstem voice 1 and downstem voice 2, when you save and reopen the file you’ll find that the downstem voice 2 notes have migrated to downstem voice 1. (I take that as a sign that Dorico itself doesn’t care much about specific voices, just whether a voice is upstem or downstem and whether it’s distinct from another similar voice.)

Select all, filter for notes and chords, right click, and choose Cross Staff > Reset to Original Staff.

3 Likes
3

If you find you have many “unnecessary” voices you can simply move them to another voice…

Filter for voice x and use v repeatedly to cycle it through other available voices. As you do so redundant rests will also be removed.

3 Likes
4

Thanks for the tip on selecting original staff and filtering – huge help.

Is there no way for my default voice colors to work?

I’m pretty knowledgeable about using voices in Dorico as much of my music is contrapuntal for keyboard. But I need to clean up these files for an analysis project, a program looking for voices. I may assign instruments to voices at a later date.

The files I have are sloppy and have too many voices or improperly assigned voices, so some notes need to be moved to correct voices.