First time posting here,
First of all, I’m switching from Sibelius and I’m absolutely flabbergasted by the quality of Dorico. So props to any and all involved who might read this. I haven’t been this excited about notation software in a long time 
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I’ve already read and played with a ton of settings, but am encountering a few time-wasting automatic actions. I’d like to see if I can fix them by default.
- I’m importing some of my old scores to learn the program. Some XMLs already have parts hard-combined in the score (flt. 1, 2 ob. 1, 2, etc.) The parts xmls are outdated or simply missing, and I don’t mind working from score to learn the program.
- I’m turning every condensed part into multiple single players in Dorico, so I’m using the explode feature quite a bit.
- To test things, I generally copy an entire movement, then explode into two empty staves.
- This fails on two counts. First, and most importantly, if I explode music containing ONE NOTE into two staves, the staff that didn’t receive a note will automatically check the “Ends voice” box in the Notes and Rests field. This is time consuming to then correct each instance so I can continue editing that staff. Any way to automatically change this behavior would be very helpful.
- Second, if the original combined part is written as both multi-voice (independent), and one voice (a dyad with stems in same direction), Dorico seems to explode the first method it sees correctly, then fails on the second method. I think this may be a moot point since I’ll be using separate players and condensing in the future, but I thought I’d mention it.
Thanks!
Welcome to the forum, Robert. I’m very glad to hear that you’re so far enjoying your initial experiences with Dorico. I very much hope that continues!
I think the main problem you’re having with Explode results from the fact that the notes imported from MusicXML will have had these properties applied in order to maintain as closely as possible the appearance of the original music. If your plan is to do structural work on the music after you import it from Sibelius, I’d recommend going to the MusicXML Import page of Preferences and switching off most of the options there: that will allow Dorico to interpret the data much more closely as if you had input it directly into Dorico yourself.
Having already imported the music and having made a bunch of other changes, you can retrospectively remove these properties by doing Edit > Select All, then Edit > Filter > Notes and Chords, then Edit > Filter > Deselect All, then Edit > Filter > Tuplets, which will leave only notes and rests selected. You can then go to the Properties panel and switch off the ‘Starts voice’ and ‘Ends voice’ properties.
Thanks so much. As I continued I realized the issue must be the many forgotten actions I took to “engrave” the Sibelius file the first go around. The parts are combined into one staff to look good on a score, not to make logical computer sense. But telling me the options for future imports is a tremendous help, thank you. And in new projects in Dorico it should be totally moot.
And yes, I’m thrilled to be switching to Dorico. I heard the origin story back in 2013 from a publisher friend and hadn’t followed up until now, sticking with my normal workflow. The catalyst was sending a very large un-condensed score to a teacher for review, who asked me to reduce it down 30 minutes prior to a lesson. It’s usually at least a 3 hour process to finely condense manually, so obviously I couldn’t finish. He told me it’s a 3 minute (really two click) process in Dorico. Purchased that day. I’ve already spent at least 25 hours importing and editing scores in the couple days since, and there have been innumerable happy surprises and quality of life improvements noticed. So in short, Bravo!