Editing a Tonality System is risky!

Dorico
#1

I edited the pitch deltas of the accidentals in a complex Tonality System in 12,000 EDO (a Just Intonation notation system). These edits were minuscule, corrections of one to five steps. ie. thousands-of-semitone. The devastating result was that most of the accidentals in my already completed score have disappeared. The playback is still correct.
Unless there’s some trick I’m not aware of, I will now have to go through every single note of my complex score and add the accidentals.

That the playback is intact helps me in this particular case but generally speaking, I think it’s a bug. It has created extra work for me before. When music that’s written in a microtonal Tonality System is copy-pasted on a 12EDO staff, the microtonal accidentals will be gone, as expected, but the VST tuning data (which is invisible and impossible to edit) remains. So an E natural might still be microtonally inflected in the playback and will only be transposed to the correct pitch after selecting it an (re)forcing it to E natural (by pressing 0).

#2

Backups, backups and more backups. Dorico has a nice built in previous save versioning, you can set the number. And if you’re VCS conversant, Perforce and Git LFS support binary file versioning. Otherwise I’ve found Ctrl/Cmd-Z to work in everything I tried.

But otherwise that makes sense, you’re ripping the framework from an existing sky scraper and replacing it with something else. That’s bound to be a hairy ride.

#3

I do have backups. But even if I went back to a version with the Tonality System unedited, I would face the same problem because I need to do the edits and whatever I do, I will lose the accidentals from the score.

I think one should be able to edit both the appearance and the pitch delta of an existing accidental and have that reflected in the score, similarly to editing the appearance or function of, say , a playing technique - all the playing technique markings automatically appear in their edited form in the score. Dorico doesn’t suddenly erase half of them.
I do know this has to do with the still unsolved problems in the microtonal implementation, such as transposition (which does not work) but microtuning messages attached to individual notes is hardly “ripping the framework”.

#4

Sorry to hear of this problem, nylonius. It’s not a bug, but it’s definitely something that we should try to improve in future. The reason you get this result is that each note stores its precise pitch, and also the specific accidental definition that you’ve chosen, but those two bits of data are of necessity separate. When you edit the tonality system and you change the specific delta associated with a particular accidental, that changes the accidental, but it doesn’t change the pitches of the notes in the project that currently show that accidental. Instead, the pitch of the note and the accidental no longer match, which means that Dorico can no longer show that accidental for those notes.

What we should consider for the future is a step that would optionally go through and update the pitch of any note that uses the edited accidentals to match the new delta, though I can imagine that’s non-trivial in its own right.

#5

Thank you Daniel. Yes, that would indeed be a welcome solution.
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