Documentation of what's supported in Dorico's MusicXML import?

Is there any document available for what Dorico’s MusicXML import supports / does not support? It would be nice?

That sounds to me like a very sensible suggestion.

Hopefully someone from Steinberg will respond to this - I know they are very busy right now.

I presume (happy to be corrected) that the collective experience of Dorico users plays an important role in finding issues with MusicXML import and export and therefore anything that better informs the forum of what is expected to work is helpful.

Presumably there would be no reason not to also document what is included in Dorico’s MusicXML export.

The list I provided a few years ago in the post linked below is probably still reasonably accurate:

We have done a few things since that list, I think:

– Repeat markers (D.C./D.S./Coda etc.) are now exported
– Fingering is exported
– Figured bass is exported
– Time signature export has been improved such that common/cut-common signatures are handled better
– Some improvements to complex multi-voice tuplet export
– Fixes for octave transposing clefs when exporting

There remains a great deal to do, no doubt, both in terms of import and export.

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Thanks Daniel, but this is about MusicXML export. My question was about MusicXML import documentation. I ty to figure out what Dorico can import and what’s not supported.

Well, we don’t have an exhaustive list for import, either, I’m afraid. We have never made it a goal to fully implement every part of the MusicXML specification, so beyond the level of import that we have already implemented, we are driven to some degree by user need. If you have specific requirements, please let me know what they are. I can’t guarantee that we will be able to implement your requests, but I can promise that we will consider them. (This, of course, is true of all requests in general!)

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I did a lot of transfering pieces from Photoscore Ultimate to Dorico 4 in the last days. Two things I missed a lot, were “cresc.”, which are added as text and not added as dynamics and fermatas, which didn’t make it into Dorico at all. I don’t know, if Photoscore exports them in a way, Dorico could make any use of them.

Hi Daniel,
Thank you for being so helpful! Dorice 4.0 is fantastic and you have all done an incredible job! :clap:

It’s great that you want to know what specific requirements I have on the MusicXML import and I really hope you will be able to implement them in one of the coming updates or releases. It would save a lot of time in my workflow. Dorico already can do all the notations but they need to be used by the MusicXML import.

The elements I would like to be supported are these technical elements:

  1. <up-bow> and <down-bow> for string bowing
  2. <harmonic>, <natural>, <artificial>, <base-pitch>, <touching-pitch> for harmonics
  3. <stopped> and <open> for stopped horns
  4. <snap-pizzicato>
  5. <other-technical> for all playing techniques indicated by text, such as pizz., con sord., and flautando

A proposal for unsupported elements:
Now I make sure that all of these unsupported elements additionally are exported as <words> elements to be able to identify them in Dorico and replace them with the playing techniques manually. Instead of doing this separately in the xml file it would be very nice if the name of an unsupported technical elements were inserted as staff text in Dorico when they are found in the import. And if they would use red color they would be very easy to identify as warnings that action is needed. This should of course only be done if the Text items option is active in the MuiscXML import settings.

In addition to these requirements, I also would like the double-note tremolos to always be imported as you said in this separate topic:

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I’d love to see these additions as well. Seems they are still lacking.
Especially a little frustrating that we don’t have pizz and ord. available yet.

But again, pizz is not even an official thing in MusicXML which is very strange!

I believe most of these are now supported on import from MusicXML in Dorico 5. Are you not finding that this is the case?