Copy & Paste with Barlines and Time Signatures?

Hello,

I just imported, via MusicXML from Finale 25.5, the vocal score for an opera I’ve been working on. Now that the project is in Dorico, I’d like to split the scenes into flows. I understand that, currently, the best way to split music into flows is via copy and paste, but when I try to copy and paste a whole scene, Dorico doesn’t seem to properly copy and paste the time signature changes, or the barlines.

Am I missing the correct way to do this, or does anyone have a workaround for now if it’s not automatic yet?

Thanks,
Julian Bennett Holmes

what I do, before pasting into the new flow: I give the flows the right time signature in the beginning.
If you have further time signature changes, put them in afterwards. Your music stays intact, anyway.

Done this a couple of times, and never had any problems getting the time signatures along… make sure everything is properly selected before you copy…

For some reason, I still was never able to copy everything properly. What I ended up doing in the end was copying the entire piece of music with cmd-a, pasting into the new flow, and then deleting from there. This worked fine, but was a little slow.

It’ll be great when there’s a “split into flows” feature!

Yes, I have often wanted to copy and paste material from one part of a composition to another, but changes of time signature do not come along with it (I have fairly frequent meter changes). The best workaround I’ve found is to manually pre-insert time signatures into the correct patterns for the correct number of measures before pasting into it, but then Dorico often creates measures that don’t actually have enough beats, or creates little extra measures of one beat, etc., so it ends up being a very laborious process. I hope that having this all happen automatically can be a possibility for the future. Thanks.

Select All doesn’t really select all, but, completing what fratverno said, you can manually select any objects that were not selected (usually system objects, such as tempi and time signatures) by Cmd+clicking them.

Hello

What I did was :
In Setup Mode : right click on the “master” flow" and select “duplicate flow”
In Write Mode : I went in the newly created flow and with system track enable (in view menu) I selected all the bars I didn’t want and clicked on the “bin” icon. No need to pre-insert time signature changes, or “post”-insert time signature changes. Quite fast actually.
“Split into flow” feature would be nice though.

The System Track didn’t exist in May 2017, but does now. It nicely solves this problem.

“Split Into Flows” now exists, so this is no longer an issue.

I don’t know…I have to reset the bar-numbers, my Cues with letters, shorten my instrument names again…is this a faster solution than copy-paste?

If you just want to split one 20-bar flow in two, it’s probably not.

On the other hand if you want to split a 2000 bar opera into 20 flows, it’s quicker just to find the each split point, and then sort out most of your other formatting issues for all the flows at once in Layout Options.

FWIW you can create a bar number change that doesn’t change anything (with two mouse clicks) just before you split the flow. That way you don’t need to check back to find the right bar number and retype it. You can probably save time with the cues (rehearsal marks? cues in Dorico are something different) doing them the same way.

good point, yep. Thanx.