Condensing anomaly?

I am experimenting with Condensing, to determine whether it is a viable option for my present score and have come across instances where voices are left on separate staves without any reason that is obvious to me. A good example is below.


The woodwinds condense, with the exception of the oboes. Seeing no reason for this, but thinking that possibly there was a difference between bars 152-4 that I could not see, I cloned Ob.2 from Ob.1 by means of Alt-click and transposed the result. This made no difference: the parts still do not condense.

Any ideas why?

Thanks!

David

Many possible reasons, because condensing is very complex and context-sensitive, and mostly impossible to identify from a picture alone. Please share the project, or a saved-as version that only contains enough material to demonstrate the issue.

Ob-150-condensing.dorico (1.2 MB)

In order to condense onto the same staff, breath marks have to be compatible. So duplicate the breath mark to the 2. Oboe and they’ll condense.

That said –

  • A lot of your gradual dynamics aren’t rhythmically the right length, you’ve simply dragged them longer/shorter in Engrave mode. If my memory serves, you posted about this in another thread and in that thread, I told you how you can control the rhythmic position and length of dynamics in Write mode. They don’t have to start/end at noteheads, you have other options. You will encounter far fewer issues with graphical offsets not carrying through to condensed staves if you reread this carefully-assembled advice and follow it, because the dynamics won’t be offset at all.

  • You decreased the minimum gap between immediate dynamics and the staff in Engraving Options > Dynamics > Vertical Position, but didn’t decrease the value for gradual dynamics by the same amount (1 space). That’s why your immediate and gradual dynamics aren’t aligning. Reducing the gradual dynamic gap by a space will fix that globally, no graphical intervention for every single gradual dynamic required.

  • Dynamics will align in a row if you group them.

Here is your project back with some of those changes. I applied the Silence playback to make the file size smaller.

Ob-150-condensing_LH.dorico (983.5 KB)

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