For some reason horn 1 slurs disappear when condensing is turned on.
Horns 1 & 2 are exact copies of Horns 3 & 4, which don’t seem to have a problem. Is there a setting I don’t know about, or am I doing something wrong?
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Are you able to cut down the project to just the affected bars and then upload it here so we can take a look? Problems with condensing are more or less impossible to diagnose from screenshots, I’m afraid.
Hi Daniel. Here’s a partially cut down version.
Planets (reduced) cut down.dorico (1.2 MB)
There’s a few odd things about this file:
Bar 25: the slurs in horns 1&2 disappear. I thought it might be to do with the “open” symbol, but I replaced it with the open text playing technique and it made no difference.
Bar 44 on: slurs gone in horn 1
Bar 52 on: slurs gone in both 1 & 2
Also, Trumpets 1&2 are doing strange things condensing wise in bars 24-25 (double mf for a start)
Any help would be hugely appreciated!
As for the problem of slurs disappearing, there is a limitation (or is it a bug?) in the current version of Dorico that the color of the voice before condensing must be blue (the color Dorico gives to the first voice in a staff). Your Horn in F 1 is now being red color. This is the reason of this problem.
So you need to make this voice part blue. Try deleting the Mute in bar 14(This seems to be attached to a different voice.), save project,close project and reopen the project. This should turn the voice color of Horn 1 blue and the slurs should be displayed correctly.
Or, alternatively, select all bars from 25 to 67 of Horn 1 and change voice to Down-stem Voice 1. This should also turn the voice color blue immediately and display the slurs correctly.
OK, that works – but now I’m quite confused.
When I click on the notes in the Horn 1 part, the notes show in the Status Bar as being Up-stem Voice 1 – the same as Horns 2, 3, and 4 – yet when I turn on voice colors I see that it is indeed red, not blue. This is very odd.
In all the other condensing parts, everything is Up-stem Voice 1, and they condense nicely. Why do I need to change Horn 1 to Down-stem Voice 1 in order to make it condense with an Up-stem Voice 1 (Horn 2)? It seems backwards and doesn’t make any sense to me (even though it obviously works!)
Am I misunderstanding something about how condensing works?
I’ve done a bit more experimenting. If I add a new horn player and copy everything into it, it is BLUE (not Red) and still Up-stem Voice 1. And condenses fine.
So it seems to me there is some kind of bug here…
Even if both voices are up-stem voice 1, no slur will be shown if the color is not blue. In this case, the color is more important than the name of the voice.
I don’t know how it happened exactly, but in your current horn 1 staff, the down stem voice1 is blue and the up stem voice1 is red. And as long as the data for the down stem remains (i.e. the playing technique: Mute in bar 14), the up stem voice 1 remains red.
Have you tried the first method I described earlier to remove the Mute in bar 14? This way you can keep all horn 1 voice as up-stem voice1, and also make these color blue.
Yes, removing the + also works, thanks! No idea how it ended up attached to something else, though…
Since you’ve been so helpful, can you look at two other related things for me? You’ll notice that the right hand of the harp and the left hand of the organ are also colored red throughout the flow – so they must be the wrong voice as well. Can’t seem to change them to voice 1, either up or downstem…
This file started out as an XML file, which is probably why there are these various strange anomalies…
The blue/red thing really shouldn’t be relevant. Dorico numbers voices as they’re created, and in MusicXML that’s a bit of a lottery. Even in a native file, if you start with Down-stem Voice 1 and later redefine that voice as Up-stem voice (via Edit > Voices > Default Stems Up), it’ll still be blue as it’s still the first voice that was created on the staff.
The fact that one of your voices is red just indicates that somewhere on that staff there’s another voice (that will be blue). The limitation is that for condensing to work properly, everything on those staves needs to be in one voice. If you select the whole stave and switch it to Upstem Voice 1, then save the project, then close and reopen it, you should (at least in theory) find that that voice is now blue.
Hi Leo. Selecting the whole stave and changing to Upstem Voice 1 was in fact the very first thing I tried with the problematic Horn 1 part; it had no effect (slurs still missing from condensing). The whole stave showed as Upstem Voice 1 anyway, even when it was “red”. (The cutdown file is attached in my reply to Daniel above if you want to give it a go – maybe there’s something I missed or was doing wrong). Deleting the stopped horn playing technique did work though, turning the entire staff blue after saving and reopening.
Selecting the whole organ left-hand or harp right hand stave and switching to Upstem Voice 1 doesn’t make a difference – they’re still red.
Grand staff instruments typically have a different voice/color for the right-hand and left-hand staves.
Well, by default, I’d say the first voices are blue, on every staff of a grand staff instrument… But still, they are different voices.
Nope.
I think this is a case of confusing translation.
The first voice created across all the staves of any instrument is blue, the second is red etc.
Ok, I stand corrected 
(and actually that’s a good thing they’re not the same colour. What a mess it could be…)
No problem. 
Follow this process exactly:
- Open the file.
- Switch to Galley View.
- Select the first bar of the Horn 1 stave.
- Edit > Select to End Of Flow.
- Edit > Voices > Change Voice > Up-stem Voice 1.
- Save the project.
- Close the project.
- Reopen the project.
I’ve just performed these steps here, and they work. I can only assume that you skipped over the bit in my previous post where I said “save the project, then close and reopen it”. This bit is crucial as it gives Dorico the chance to clear out the now unused voices. Until it does so, the slurs won’t appear.
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Ah-hah! Thanks for clearing that up for me. I generally don’t use the colors for voices, so when I turned them on (to clear up the other issue) and saw they were different I just assumed there was a problem.
When I first tried to change the voice (before posting this thread here), I didn’t know that one needed to make the change, save, close and reopen. When I followed tomotomo2’s advice above (delete the + symbol etc.) I somehow missed his clear instructions to that effect. Now that you’ve repeated it (also very clearly!), I’ll get it into my skull for the future. Thanks!
Maybe it depends which planet you’re on.