Dorico Pro 2 crashes when inputting custom accidentals

Hello - I have made a set of custom accidentals in a new tonality system (48 divisions of the octave). They appear OK and can be selected in the ‘accidentals’ panel, but Dorico 2 consistently crashes when I add them to a note. I’ve tried the usual remedies (relaunching, patience…).

I attach screenshots of the ‘edit accidental’ window and ‘edit tonality system’ window. Let me know if there is a diagnostics report I can send.

By the way, I previously managed to edit and input custom accidentals without this problem so there is definitely something up!

I’d very much appreciate your help - I need to input a large score and will convert my trial to a full version if I can get this up and running. Thank you.

Sorry that you’re encountering Dorico crashing. If you could attach the project containing the custom tonality system here, that would be helpful: zip it up and upload it.

Crashing custom accidentals.dorico.zip (322 KB)
Goodness me, you are very quick to respond!.. do you not sleep?

Here’s the zipped file, containing some of the 16 glyphs I will need (brief explanation - it’s 48-EDO plus home-made accidentals for ‘spectral seventh’ harmonics)

Many thanks,
Clement

Thanks for attaching your project. I can reproduce the crash – we’ll look into this as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Thank you. For the moment I have got round the problem by just making a new tonality system and inputting the same values. This worked on the 3rd attempt (no idea why but I think there’s some mystery with the default natural, which can sometimes be deleted and other times not)…

While I’m here: there’s small glitch in the Edit accidental window - to change Pitch delta: changing this and clicking OK doesn’t save it - you have to click elsewhere first.

Slightly off topic:

  1. it would be wonderful to have keyboard shortcuts for custom accidentals.
  2. may I suggest changing the default accidentals for 24-EDO? I receive hundreds of scores with microtones these days (life of a conductor…) and notice that there is an emerging consensus - at least in Europe - that the reversed flat sign should be for a quartertone flat, and the sharp sign with one vertical line for a quartertone sharp. Arrows are good for smaller divisions of the octave but their use for intervals as vast as a quartertone is now rather old-fashioned (with apologies to Elaine G!). Arrowed accidentals can be harder to spot when reading at speed. Of course there’s no final consensus and maybe never will be. But it would be great to have these as the Dorico defaults as I suspect many people will use them.

I was just coming back to the forum to let you know that the problem is indeed caused by you having removed the default natural accidental from the tonality system – don’t do that! We will try to make Dorico more resilient and not die if you somehow end up with no natural accidental in your tonality system, but for the time being it’s important that it is there.

We hope to add a popover for accidentals in the future so that you could type e.g. 1/24 to get the accidental with the +1/24 pitch delta.

Will there also an option for eightstones (including playback) in the future? 48 pitches per octave?
I’m also not happy with the default quarter tone accidentals. The most common ones are mirrored flat and sharps with one vertical line and 3 for 3 quarter tones up. So far I’m stuck with Finale, because I can deal with quarter and eights tones but I would love to move to Dorico…

I don’t think there’s anything to stop you setting all of this up today using the tools available in Dorico 2: try reading from here in the online docs.