Hi,
I’m having issues with the flute playback. I type in 3 crotchets (E top space twice and G above once) and when the flute plays it back the 3rd note (G) comes in early and louder.
Any ideas as to why? It seems to be fine when I change the instrument to piano. But I’m writing for flute! I haven’t changed any settings anywhere. Just created a new project.
Cheers,
Anthony
Welcome to the forum @Anthony_Merchant .
Could you please post here a demo project which exhibits that behaviour?
Thanks
MMA Flute 301 Lesson 3 Ed’s Blues.dorico (983.6 KB)
I’m noticing it seems to be just the one note and it’s happening in other projects as well. G above the top stave line comes in early and is slightly louder. Or it may only seem louder due to the shock of it coming in slightly before it should?? Every other note seems fine.
Thanks for the project. I can also hear that what you describe but have no idea where that might come from. Anyone else? Maybe @dspreadbury ?
Thanks Ulf for having a listen. At least now I know it’s not just my computer setup (and that I’m not going crazy!!) Thanks also for the welcome 
The problem seems to be with the E, not the G, and it sounds a bit like the vibrato is making some notes seem too long. The half-note E in bar 24 sounds like two quarter-notes to me, and with the tempo set to 60 bpm, the quarter-notes on E sound like two 8th notes or maybe the first two notes of a triplet. These effects don’t seem to happen on notes other than the E, and I think they’re lengthening the sound of the E slightly so that when the G comes in on time it seems early.
If the notes in bar 3 are staccato they all seem in time. If the tempo is 60 bpm it seems okay but maybe slightly early on the G, but only because the E’s are lengthened less than at a faster tempo (?). Repeated notes sound okay because any overlap is hidden, but when the note changes, the new note sounds early.
If you are able to use a different flute sound, you might try that.
I ended up downloading the free BBC Orchestra Discovery and it works fine now. Bit of a pain though that the Halcion flute does this. It’s not an overly difficult thing I’m asking it to do!! As you mentioned, sometimes I swear I can hear 2 quavers being played when only 1 crotchet is written. Thanks for the input. I think I might raise this as a bug with Steinberg. For the money they’re charging, Dorico should be able to play back 3 crotchets correctly (especially as it’s also only 2 notes).
It’s nothing to do with Dorico directly but the library you’re using. All bundled libraries have limitations – they’re free for a reason. Even the top professional libraries have odd things like this happening or worse. The main thing that sticks out for me in this example in the G after 2 E quavers coming too early in bar 7. Timing issues with notes using different articulations are not uncommon in the libraries I use as well. That can easily be adjusted in the key editor. As for the G in bar 3, I would expect natural phrasing to make this slightly louder anyway and to my ear, it doesn’t seem at all obtrusive.
Still, if the BBC Discover sorts this one then fine! We all need to choose what works best for us. But with any library, you’ll need to put in a bit of work to get good results and that’s why Dorico has the powerful key editor (and of course Expression Maps)
Thanks for the input dko. Yes you’re absolutely right it’s the library. But when I say “Dorico”, I’m referring to the notation program and the libraries that comes with it. Steinberg is charging close to $1k for DoricoPro in Australia and the main difference for me (and why I paid for it) was it came with the sound libraries. Otherwise the free SE version would have suited me just fine. But currently it seems the free library works and the bundled library I paid a lot of money for doesn’t. If to get Dorico to work properly I need to use a 3rd party sound library, I might have well just used the free SE version? Apologies for venting frustrations in public and I do very much appreciate any input into this problem. 
(I’d love nothing more than someone to tell me it’s something I’m doing wrong)
of course that’s a perfectly valid argument. The fact that I never use the libraries bundled with notation software doesn’t in any way mean others shouldn’t regard them as part of the overall package.
I guess my main point was that some work is almost inevitably going to be required in Dorico to get decent playback, irrespective of the library used. Some require less and quite a few here like NotePerfomer which usually needs rather little (although the string tone rules it out for me for serious use in a mock-up).