Any ideas on how to deal with this situation?
From this picture I can’t quite imagine what you’ve done. Can you save and post a cut-down version of this with just a few bars that show the problem?
(P.S. What language is this?)
Probably best then to have the soloist on a separate staff altogether rather than part of an ensemble divisi. My guess is that the Developers intended divisi used for a soloist for when the soloist come out of the ensemble rather than being independent.
I would set the soloist as a separate Player and then hide the staff (manually) until needed.
@Derrek Ugh. I mean, thank you for the workaround, but . . . I wish these things were clear before the weeks of work laying out the hundreds of pages of score, waiting for the little watch to make calculations that last minutes at a time for every such adjustment. I think I’ll probably just have to export the score as a pdf when I finally finish the editing, and then paste a big while rectangle over the solo staff.
@Mark_Johnson Sorry, my image cut off the signpost that says “divisi” toward the end. I have added a solo staff for one singer in the tenors. But because the “divisi” begins right where the solo starts, Dorico automatically puts the gli altri parts in the solo staff right up to the start of the divisi.
Now I’m wondering if I will have this same issue occurring again and again in the string parts every place there’s a solo or divisi section where the divisi is first sharing a staff and then breaks apart when separate staves are needed. I’m thinking I’ll have to work the way I used to work in Finale v.9x where I would have to extract parts as separate files.
Derrek is right about the separate staff. The good news for layout is that the number of staves on the page should end up the same! Try to do the work in galley view and ignore any layout messes until it’s done. Another good thing is that moving the music from one staff to another is very efficient and clean.
I’ll give the extra staff a try, but my reluctance has to do with the sheer amount of time it takes to do any modifications like adding players or instruments. For reference, here are some numbers: Processing slowness - #13 by jjm_335
Just switching from viewing a part to the full score takes about 2 minutes.
There is no substitute for learning the program and using what ingenuity one can to solve problems early on.
Presumably one could see the difficulty you found as soon as you used divisi for the first instance. Asking for help at that point would have saved a lot of time later.
@Derrek I’ve used divisi several times before. This is my first time using it where I have multiple score layouts each of which apparently requires the divisi to be handled differently.
I hardly think this is a question of “you should have known to ask before”. What is the point of having a divisi function for solo staves if it does not produce the desired result? I get that it’s complicated to make these functions work, and that one cannot have everything. But this clearly IS a case where the function just does not behave as it should.
Unfortunately divisi changes are currently limited to one “staff number” change per system. The first or prevailing divisi change in effect at the start of the system determines how many staves get shown for that player for the whole system.
If you’re able to change the casting off in the score so that the start of the solo division is at the start of the next system, then that might help?
Although, and I’m sure you’ve thought this all through so apologies if I’m stating the obvious, depending on the different layouts you need for the choir, do you need to use divisi at all? Would keeping on a single staff and just adding “solo” “tutti” etc text labels manually be sufficient? Just because you seem to be cue-ing the solo line on the gli altri staff anyway?
Another thought is that you could use divisi consistently for when parts divide, even if they are in rhythmic unison and can easily share a staff, but use condensing to control the number of staves shown at a given time?
@Lillie_Harris Thank you for the ideas. In fact, the solo part is slightly different from the others, and diverges more as the phrase continues. But maybe I can find a way to combine the parts on one staff at least for this passage.
As you suggest, and as @Derrek suggested, the option that provides the most flexibility is to work from the start with full divisi staves and then condense as needed. I just wish it didn’t take as much time to process adding staves, selecting flows, etc., with these very large files.
Again, thanks!
Have you already shared some diagnostics and potentially even the original project file with the dev team, so they can look at whether there’s something specific (in addition to their scale) that’s contributing to the slow processing?
Yes, I did share it with Daniel. He kindly spent some time with it but determined it’s really just a matter of scale.
