Constant issue with sounds disappearing or changing between sessions

This is another divisi playback thread.

I have a project (well, several projects) with multiple flows and divided strings. Because of the current situation with divisi playback, every time a section is divided into solo and tutti players, the solo stave(s) must be manually reassigned to a different voice and sound patch.

I’m finding that every time I reopen the project after closing Dorico, or sometimes even simply after saving the file and then leaving it in the background for a couple of days, the sound patches have undergone inexplicable changes that I didn’t make (so that some solo staves/voices have been somehow reassigned to tutti instruments and vice versa), or are completely silent for no obvious reason. In the current case for example, I have two soloists divided from a section, assigned to channels 7 and 13 in the HALion player, and the one assigned to channel 7 simply doesn’t play—whereas the one assigned to channel 13 plays back with the sound patch assigned to channel 7. This is perhaps because that particular voice (“Up-stem Voice 3” or whatever) was assigned to channel 7 in a different flow.

As a related subject, the voice assignments I’ve made for these solo staves don’t seem to be sticking either. I have tried to assign the soloists in one flow to new up-stem voices at least three times and each time I reopen the project they’re back in voices 1 and 2 (which they shouldn’t be, because those voices are assigned to tutti staves in other flows).

What am I doing wrong here? My current plan is to reset the playback template, see if I can come up with consistent voice assignments across every flow, and hope it stops happening, but this has been a recurring issue.

Have yet to upgrade from 3.5.12, if this has been fixed in 4.

Although the voice assignments for individual divisi sections are far from transparent in the user interface (not least because the descriptions that appear in Play mode don’t match the descriptions you see in the status bar when selecting notes in Write mode), the assignments should always at least be deterministic; we don’t have any known issues where these assignments change spontaneously.

Dorico 4 doesn’t provide any fundamental changes in the way this system works, though it does at least now describe the voices in the same terms in Play mode and Write mode, which hopefully makes it a bit easier to figure out what’s going on.

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