I recently had to switch a project from 4/4 to 12/8 (this was a MIDI import) and noticed that the change only applied up until the first double barline, after which I saw a signpost that said everything afterwards was 4/4. I can only inconsistently replicate this, I have no clue when this happens and when it doesn’t, I suspect it has to do with some insert mode setting which I don’t fully understand but I would really appreciate an explanation since I currently unfortunately don’t have the time to rtfm and properly troubleshoot.
On a related note, going from 4/4 to 12/8 has been kind of a miserable experience in general. I expected to be able to lengthen quarters to dotted quarters in insert mode by hitting period/full stop or using shift+alt+right with the grid size being 1/8 and none of them worked the way I expected.
This is the unstretched version (double barlines removed for safety)
Stretching by hitting . correctly changes the length of the notes, however it seems Dorico is leaving the second rest completely unaffected because it is already a dotted rest and then lengthening the 8th rest individually instead of summing the two rests’ durations together before performing the extension, which is what I personally think the fix would be although I don’t know where to look for how to do this.
Stretching by alt+shift+right yields even less accurate results for obvious reasons in hindsight. Lengthening everything by an 8th note is not the way to do this kind of thing, but surprisingly it worked for the first bar.
Anyway, the only way I could get the note duration to reliably stretch the exact way I wanted to was to lengthen every note manually such that there were no rests, after which I would have to re-edit the notes back to their original duration. Surely fixing this is as easy as some setting I haven’t seen about summing breaks before stretching?
Just looking at one part, I don’t understand why you are changing the meter; perhaps you need to show us enough of the score to know why the change is needed or helpful.
You show us the original 4/4 passage and then show us what you get without fully explaining what you want to get, what you expect to see.
Double barlines, or any manual barline, behave like time signatures (If you click on it you will see the time signature properties in the lower panel).
The switch from 4/4 to 12/8 was made because my composition teacher at Uni (I’m in my first year) correctly and quickly pointed out that my piece was in fact in 12/8 and not 4/4. I simply used 4/4 in the DAW out of ignorance before I started my studies, and now we’re here.
I do apologize for not expressing what I want more clearly. I want a note held for half of the bar (2/4 in 4/4 → 6/8 in 12/8), followed by an equally long half bar-long rest for the first three notes and then for the last note to be held for the entire duration of the bar. This is what I want to see. Notice how it’s the exact same as the 4/4 screenshot but dotted
Thank you for explaining. II admit it is a frustrating puzzle. Even if one makes the rests explicit, they do not stretch along with the notes.If I made each note fill the measure, then dotted them with Insert mode on, and then reduced each by half with insert mode off, I began to see what I think you wanted.
But whatever you try, the process will be arduous. Good luck to you.
Ok so I have now done a bit more testing and it turns out I can make it stretch the way I want, provided I manually go in and override Dorico’s automatically split durations like in the screenshot, and THEN go into insert mode and hit period/full stop. This is very much a hack and the issue seems to specifically be with dotted durations not being stretched, good to know but unfortunate that a more elegant solution has not been implemented (unless of course, as I said before, I am missing some setting). I will leave this open for another few days or so just in case but otherwise I will just mark this as solved
