Hi all, I’m Taro who posts a topic for the first time. Thank you in advance for your support.
Recently I’m studying what is the easiest way to check the playback repeat order with Dorico. For example in Finale where you need to assign which D.S. al Coda should go which D.S. manually by yourself, there is a function called “Check Repeats” to check the playback order easily with your eyes, not with ears.
In Dorico, I think basically assigning repeat marks is semi-automatically done by using Marker index but when it doesn’t work as expected, it suddenly becomes difficult to figure out what is wrong. To check the playback order, you sometimes need to listen to the playback actually and it takes time. You could turn “Bar Numbers - Count repeats” on, but this is a bit hard to read.
So I’m just wondering what is the easiest way to check the playback order. One idea I came up to is to create a new project like “250208_repeat_test_coda2.dorico” attached, and reproduce the playback order within one page to check it by ear quickly, but it’s still a bit troublesome.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about so far. I’d appreciate it if you have a better ideas, thank you.
I see… so if Dorico’s playback doesn’t work it’s most likely the repeat mark setting is out of standard.
Maybe as you know you can set repeat marks in playback as you like in Finale, I guess this could be one of barrier for ex-Finale users to get familiar with Dorico. I’ll be careful, thanks for your suggestion!
I find the easiest way to check repeat structures is to temporarily change “Bar numbering for repeated sections” on the Bar Numbers page of Engraving Options to “Count repeats”. Then if you show bar numbers on every bar you can see the repeat structure written out.
Thanks, it’s good to know “Count repeats” would be the best way at this point. BTW I see some bars have consecutive numbers like (18)(19), do you think this is an expected behavior? You can see it on 250208_repeat_test_coda2.dorico (777.1 KB) previously attached.
My first guess is that this could stem from your signs not being exactly at the start or end of a bar, thus making the bar count twice.
See for example your “To Coda 2” hwich seems to float somewhere above the bar (and I guess musicians will have a hard time knowing where exactly to jump). Will the numbers be correct if you move to jumps to the very end (or start) of the bar?
Thanks I think that’s a good guess, but it seems the position is correctly recognized by Dorico.
(BTW I agree with your opinion about the default positioning of the repeat signs, I always want to readjust the position with Engrave option too. But I didn’t do it with this test project. )
As @Estigy suggested, I moved the markers To Coda 1, To Coda 2 and D.S.S. al Coda so they are attached to the beginning of the following bar. I also used the property ‘Jump to’ index to change D.S. al Coda into D.S. al Coda 1 and D.S.S. al Coda into D.S.S. al Coda 2.
I just wanted to pack everything in 4 pages. It becomes a bit complicated if I do it and it was hard to check the playback order, but I think this “creating condensed test project” is one of the solution when you encounter troubles.
