Really love the newly implemented features, especially the ability to create our own custom instruments.
Problems are to be expected in the early days of a release, and I am getting frequent crashes while attempting to select my custom instruments for further editing. D5 freezes then crashes. When reopening after crashing, I am sending the prompted crash reports.
I should add that I am working mostly with custom variants. These are comprised of standard instruments to which I append a code identifying an instrument from a particular library. For example, the default Flute gets a variant with “1 /s” for the VSL Synchron Flute 1. Another variant is “2 /z” for the VSL Synchron-ized Flute 2, etc.
There are indeed a couple of crashes that we’ve identified in the reports on the forum already today. As a workaround, you may find that you can edit an instrument more reliably if you don’t yet have an example of that instrument in the project you are using.
I should add that unless I am making a mistake I’m not aware of, sometimes a variant loses the instrument family assignment from the original, and I am not aware of any way to make a new family assignment when this happens.
This does not happen every single time, just sometimes.
I’ve seen this as well. In my case the process was…
Create a new instrument from a factory instrument.
Exit Instrument Editor
Reopen Instrument Editor
Create a variant of the new instrument.
The original custom instrument loses the Family setting.
I’ve also seen it happen when editing the Variant Name when using a variant of a custom instrument.
Also, the Edit Instrument Names often causes the custom instrument to disappear clearing all the fields.
Ah, if you make a variant of a copy I can see how that would happen - that ties in with some other problems with copies that we’ve also seen. Thanks.
In my case so far as I am aware I am always making a variant of an original factory instrument, for example to Flute (Default) adding separate variants “1 /s” and “2 /s” and “a3 /s”.
Haven’t had time to experiment with it further because lately I spend most of what energy I have visiting my wife in the hospital. I’ll see if I can work with it more tomorrow, but not sure.
Sorry to hear about your wife. I tried an experiment and was able to reproduce it that way as well.
Create variant of Flute with a variant name.
Create a second variant of the factory Flute with a variant name.
Exit Editor.
Upon reopening the Editor, the first variant is missing the Family.
I can confirm that on reopening some variants (not just the first) lose their Family assignment. What showed as “Woodwinds” before saving and closing, when opened, shows blank. And it’s not even consistent.
I just looked at some oboes created last night using the factory instrument, clicking to add variants and creating a few. These all showed “Woodwinds” last night. Today “Woodwinds” is gone for multiple variants but remains for others. So far as I know I didn’t do anything different creating them, and I took the precaution of having no instruments assigned to any players in Setup.
I’ve seen it when manually setting the variant name. When adding a new transposition, closing and reopening the Editor automatically fills in the variant name. This “seems” to work OK.
The recent update to Dorico 5 seemed to address the problem of variants not inheriting the family assignments of their original. However, I have discovered that this does not appear to be working consistently.
I just created five variants of the Oboe using the same process one after the other. As the attached screenshots show, one did retain the family while the other did not. I have tried opening and closing the editor but the same problem persists.
I do recognize that these updates are a work in progress and offer this only as a help.
Our testers found another case for this problem after Dorico 5.0.10 was released on Wednesday, and we’ve applied another fix, so hopefully the case they found is the same as the one you have found here, and this will therefore be fixed for you when we next release an update.
