File corrupt.

Hi, been working a few days with a short Ligeti piece. Importing xml from Finale to begin with.
Lots of editing and almost done when all of a sudden, can’t open file with error: “is a Directory”
This happened before with another short piece. Some of the last things I did was pasting text into
a text frame. This is rather serious I think. Ligeti piece just to try various aspects of notation in Dorico.
If it was my own music it would be a disaster if this happened. Also with no auto backups. Feel I need to
do a backup for every editing step since I don’t know when it will happen and what caused it.

Here’s the file.

Jesper
Ligeti.dorico.zip (764 KB)

Thanks for reporting this, Jesper. Can you please attach the file you used to paste text from? Where is the text coming from? What format is it in? I’m sure there must be something specific about the text you are pasting that is causing this problem.

Text coming from this Finale file. Allthough I’m not 100% sure it was from the text but I think so.
I selected the different text explainations and copied directly from Finale and pasted into
Dorico text frame. All looked ok when I saved the document. Just when opening it again I couldn’t.

Jesper

Also see this thread:

Ligeti2005.mus.zip (31.1 KB)

Thanks. It looks as if when you copy text from Finale, the copied text is terminated with a null character (U+0000), which should really not be included by Finale when it copies to the clipboard. Dorico 1.0.10 has no protection against unexpected null characters in pasted text, and it ends up busting the file when it’s saved, unfortunately.

Fortunately this is easy for us to fix (we can simply strip out any null characters that are either pasted or typed into the text editor) so we can include a fix in the next update.

In the meantime, I recommend you don’t copy and paste text directly from Finale, as I imagine all text you paste will include a null character, which will break your Dorico project. Instead, paste into a plain text editor (I recommend BBEdit, or its free lite version, TextWrangler), and you will see a spurious extra character at the end of the string (for me, it shows up as an upside-down question mark when I paste from Finale). Delete that character, then re-select the text, copy it to the clipboard, and then paste that into Dorico, and you should be OK.

Once the next update is available, you should be able to paste directly from Finale again without worrying about it, but for now you will need to be careful.

Brilliant, thanks for finding the problem so quickly. Will edit in smultron before pasting.
Any chance you could strip the null characters from the Ligeti file so that I can open it again?
Only if it is easily done, otherwise dont bother. Good practise for me to enter it again. Rather tricky though.

Jesper

I’m afraid not, the file is basically knackered at the point of saving so we can’t recover the data. Really sorry! It is a bad bug but not one that people will have to live with for very long.

Ok, that’s what I thought. Just glad it wasn’t an important file and that it will be fixed so that it doesn’t happen to anyone else with some more important work.
Thanks Daniel.

Jesper