Empty-handed Player - strange behaviours

Dorico
#1

Hi folks,

I’m working on a temporary (but needed immediately for a publication) fix to the condensing issues spoken about in this thread https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=186945&p=988665#p988665 by making each instrument have a solo part, e.g., Trumpet in C 1, Trumpet in C 2, Trumpet in Bb 1, Trumpet in Bb 2, Trumpet in A 1, Trumpet in A 2, etc. This means I have to add about 50 extra solo parts to my Dorico workbook project. My workbook also has about 50 flows. And, to compound the workload, I actually have to do this in four separate Dorico projects, as each chapter of my publication has about 50 flows, and early on in my engraving once I got to 80 flows, the processing speed slowed down enough that it made sense to split the chapters up into separate Dorico projects. (If you’re wondering, I’m working on an orchestration treatise-like publication with many short examples of orchestrations)

The “easiest” way to fix my condensing issue seems to be to create an Empty-handed Player, that I can then drag the instrument, i.e., Trumpet in A 2, and its music to. Seems easy enough. But in creating an Empty-handed Player, the player is linked to a random flows (not sure why it’s a random assortment of 18 or more of the 50 Flows). This is also an issue when adding instruments to a project with many flows, as the new instrument gets randomly added to random flows, which then have to be double checked and unlinked from.

Now we get to the crux of problem: I unlink the Empty-handed Player from all the the Flows, so that I can duplicate it 50 times, but the duplicate links to the random 18 Flows that I just unchecked! This would be fine in an empty project, but in a project full of music and many flows, unlinking a flow from an instrument takes a fair amount of time.

So: any tips on creating an Empty-handed Player that is not linked to any Flows?

Thanks again :slight_smile:

#2

Could you set up your players (empty or not) in a separate project with a flow empty of music (or with one note) and then import the empty flow into your larger project?

#3

Hi Derrek, thanks for writing :slight_smile:

Importing a Flow with the extra instruments would work, except for the time it would take to look through all the flows and then move the music to these new instruments (introducing the chance for error too, as clarinet 1, 2, and 3 imported into a file with three clarinets relabels these as clarinets 4, 5, and 6. Multiply that by 50+ new instruments, and making sure to remember to correctly copy paste the music from clarinet 2 to clarinet 5, and from horn 4 to horn 8… makes for a lot of manual labour… but which I may just have to do…). And then there’s deleting the old multiple instruments from the player. And also the time it takes to add the newly imported instruments to the correct Flows is a bit of a concern (adding and removing instruments to a Flow is not a quick procedure processing-wise when there are 50 Flows)

#4

When you add a new player to any project, you should find that it is automatically assigned to every flow in the project, not to a random selection of them. I’d need to see the project itself to offer any further explanation as to why that doesn’t appear to be the case in this project.

If you can afford to wait a while, future versions of Dorico will allow you to condense section players, so that’s perhaps an alternative? Obviously if you have an immediate deadline that’s no good to you!

#5

I certainly was not expecting this to be so close in the priority list, and is a good news for me :slight_smile:

#6

Did you by any chance import the flows that players aren’t being added to? I think new players you add to a project are only automatically assigned to flows that originated in that project, not flows that you imported in from elsewhere.

#7



Thanks for the feedback! @Daniel, my first deadline is in early June, and another one in mid-August. It would be handy to leave my projects as they are and wait for the next update, but I would need know the release date—and I know you don’t announce those— in order for me to plan accordingly. @Lillie, I have imported many flows into and between my projects. So that would make sense that it appears “random” to me when the new instruments get added to some flows and not to others. Thanks for pointing that out! Hopefully this can be fixed in a future update.

But you gave me a great idea and it appears to have solved my immediate problem; basically it’s the opposite of what Derrek suggested. I created a Dorico project with one instrument and one flow, and imported my flows and instrumentation. Now when I add a new instrument/Empty-handed player, it is only added to Flow 1! Yes!! :slight_smile: I can easily drag all the section instruments and their respective musics out to these empty-handed players.