Exploding midi

Working with an imported midi file. I’ve got some polyphony in a couple of voices, and I figured that I could copy and Paste Special/explode to separate the lines. I’ve done it before, but it didn’t work this time. So I’m wondering whether there are criteria that govern this function?

Going back to the Cubase file I was working with, I was able to use the explode function under the Score menu there, and … zzzz … re-import. Might it be useful for the developers to compare the two approaches at some point?

Was the passage you copied to paste special in Dorico one voice (chords) or multiple, independent voices on the staff?

more the latter than the former, but not in the Dorico sense of discrete, separate voices
I’d paste an image, but having reworked the source, I deleted the previous version…

In general there’s no limitation on the kind of material you can use with Dorico’s Explode feature. Did you perhaps select a range of music that contained a different number of voices? That seems unlikely since material imported via MIDI will (for now) always be notated in a single voice.

Thanks Daniel. The original output source for this is Wotja (www.wotja.com if you’re not familiar with the app), which can create voices with multiple MIDI channels. I don’t think that’s the case here, though, partly because part of the process in Cubase is to split all of those into individual lines.
Original (ignore the second staff):


Paste special/exploded

Note measure 209 > 9, which has split as might be expected.
(Horns were the closest blank staves for illustration purposes). I suspect the intertwined tied notes might have a bearing.

Perhaps there’s a setting in Wotja you can use to assign each voice or layer to its own track? That would solve the problem at its source.

:slight_smile: they don’t even give me the choice between MIDI 0 and MIDI 1…

not to worry; I think my takeaway from this is that Cubase and Dorico approach this task in different ways, useful to know

Your upper example shows two staves, which (if that was part of your import) suggests that Wotja is already exporting multiple tracks (MIDI 1?)

But you would still need to arrange the various notes on the upper staff (of the upper example) to play/export on different MIDI channels before exporting from Wotka.