Feature Request + Improvement

[superblonde]

@Michel_Edward

I really find it odd that Dorico will have a measure with the wrong number of beats show up inadvertently

This is exactly the topic of a prior bug report of mine, an aspect of Dorico which has given me problems since I commented on it in Dorico 3.0 and finally wrote at length about it for 4.0, Time signature changes cause incorrect measures from incorrect number of beats

Bizarrely the response from other legacy users here has been essentially, “you’re doing it wrong” or “you haven’t figured this out yet?” or “this [operation which yields improper engraving which isn’t flagged] is the way it’s supposed to work” or “it’s not a bug it’s a feature”.

@Lillie_Harris

I also happen to agree that a hypothetical view option to identify bars whose beat contents don’t match the prevailing time signature could be useful as well. … Dorico doesn’t count in bars, it counts in beats.

It is nice to know that the design team is aware of this as a problem, at least. Just signpost all metrically incomplete measures and this will be solved. Which means that Dorico simply must count beats within bars.

@mducharme

It might be nice if it could show signposts for pickup bars - then at least you could see that a bar was shorter by having a signpost appear over it and that could call your attention to it. At least it would make proofing easier.

Agreed, which is exactly the goal of an engraving program: to make engraving seamless…

@mducharme

The only thing Dorico does differently than a DAW is that in a DAW you won’t usually end up with these “fractional” measures like in Dorico. … rhythmic shifts would be harmless in a DAW and easily correctable, but in notation, this could easily screw up custom engraving that was done, and applying a corrective shift back after the fact may not restore things back to how they previously looked. This is similar to how you can wreck certain engraving details by shifting things in insert mode and, even after shifting them back, they may not look exactly the same as they did before they were shifted in the first place.

It is more than simply an engraving problem because Dorico will playback notationally-invalid measures (i.e. bars with missing beats) as if the measure is valid, which a real conductor would never do. A real conductor would halt the reading because there are missing beats and would be forced to fix the engraving.

@FredGUnn

Even a smallish orchestra of 30 musicians x $120hr + $300 hr studio works out to $65 a minute. Congrats, a 5 minute clusterf**k to figure out why Dorico only has 3 beats in a 4/4 bar just cost the producer $325 and probably got the copyist fired.

This in fact did happen in the rehearsal of my previous string quartet score (after the score had been reviewed multiple times by at least 4 other composers and the conductor), it took about 2-3 minutes of confused rehearsal time to figure out what was going on, i.e. why there were missing beats in the Dorico score, as the cellist noted from the stage, “How do I play measure x since there are only 6 notes and the time signature is 9/8 ?”. Although I didn’t get fired (I didn’t get hired, either), it took valuable minutes of the already cramped 20 minute rehearsal time, which actually was priceless time, with SF Symphony performers.

@Steve_Sensenig

If Dorico had automatically changed that measure to a 2/4 bar and displayed a 2/4 time signature, there would have been no confusion. I understand your example of those incomplete measures stacking up, but as it is, if you did the steps you’re talking about, you would still potentially end up with an incomplete bar and no way to know it unless you thought to count the beats yourself.

Dorico shouldn’t automatically insert or change stuff, but it should definitely raise a signpost for incomplete bars. Then it would be clear that there is an engraving error to fix. There should never be a need to manually count beats in every measure when using an engraving application; that’s the entire purpose of using an engraving application.

@mducharme

I also advocated (even in my very last post before this one) for the ability to fill in the time signature for these incomplete bars with a really simple action like a single click.

This is a very good suggestion for a way to fix the Playback bug where playback currently continues to play beats as if nothing had occurred. A metronome click (on all channels of the mix) should replace the missing beats and the playback cursor should remain hovering on the missing beats until they’ve been “filled in” with artificial playback. These missing-beat clicks could be optionally only be played if the “Missing beats” Signpost is visible; so, there would also be a way to turn off the inserted clicks.

@John_Ruggero

I sometimes have difficulty knowing how many beats are actually in a measure. So, I option-click the System Track and count up the divisions displayed so I can correct the measure. Is this the only way to know how many beats are actually in a measure?
So there is no way to tell how many beats there are in a measure other than option-clicking the System Track?

You can insert an Ossia above and across multiple bars (or even across the entire score), and then add new notes, one at a time, of duration which matches the beat duration, allowing the Dorico cursor to proceed naturally across the bars in adding the notes. Then count/compare the beats visually, and after verifying that the true musical measures are correct, delete the Ossia. None of this should be necessary if Dorico worked properly.