In the large scale Piano Sonata I am doing, suddenly all the dozens of grace notes entered, most before the barline, became untied, when I had explicitly tied them during note entry. This is Dorico 5, installed a few days ago.
Is this the work of aliens? I am aware that it is the start of a particularly expressive Crop Circle season this year, so it must be related to that.
Seriously, is there any possible thing I could have accidentally done to cause this? Very weird.
This is getting more weird. Despite fixing them, I go back and they are untied again. This only happened after I installed NP4, but that couldn’t possibly interfere with grace notes before the bar, could it? No.
Are diagnostics of any use in this case?
Only a document file itself is likely to be of help.
I see. Who to send to? Also, it’s not for public distribution at this time.
At the very least, a screenshot, with all signposts showing.
Do you use a stream deck, or something similar? I can just imagine that some shortscuts/macros went berserk.
No StreamDeck. Funny you should mention that. For the first time, I was just looking at buying one yesterday. Must have scared the grace notes.
@benwiggy the signposts show me nothing about graces.
Hello All,
I have found out what it is. It is a real and reproducible phenomenon, and not me going nuts.
This happened after I updated to NP4. At first I could not get it to make any sound for my piano score, previously working fine. Perplexed, I tried various things. In the end, for no rational reason I thought I could prod it into life by changing the instrument in Setup from piano to, ahem, piano. [Yes that my be crazy!] This worked, and now I have a remarkably good mockup, using the NP piano, which previously I never thought much of.
That’s when this started happening. Today I made a minimal working example. Sure enough, changing the instrument from piano to piano immediately makes the grace note ties go away.
This can’t be right. Why should grace note ties be eliminated? I am not quick to claim things are bugs, but this sure appears to be a defect in Dorico 5 (and possibly 4) to me. Can I report it as such?
I have attached the simple example. Try changing piano to piano and setup and observe the grace ties disappear. Completely deterministic and repeatable.
The worst part is that in the proper sonata, I add them back in, and after closing and reopening, some stick and some are gone again, with no predictable rationale.
I hope this has not corrupted my big sonata file in some permanent way.
graces untying.dorico (893.0 KB)
Is there a prize for the oddest behaviour of the week? 
[Note that I am NOT putting this on NP4. It was just that fiddling to get it to work led me down this path of replacing the instrument like for like.]
In two new Dorico projects I tried what you described, with Cornet changing to Cornet, and changing from Flute to Violin. The ties from the grace notes to the normal notes disappeared in both cases.
Thank you @StevenJones01 for providing more evidence.
I’m sure this will always have been the case, but it’s not intentional, of course. When you use the Change Instrument feature (or now if you edit the instrument via the new instrument editor), Dorico essentially replaces the instrument and remaps all of the existing voices etc. onto new voices on the new instrument’s staves. Ties from grace notes to main notes rely on some internal IDs being consistent, and without having looked into the code, I guess that we’re not updating the properties for grace notes that specify the target notes for the ties. We’ll look into this.
Thanks @dspreadbury. Changing piano to piano is a rare (and probably stupid case) but changing flute to violin is a very real possibility.
Actually, re-applying the “same” instrument can happen very frequently when importing XML files to make sure Dorico recognizes the instrument as its own to apply its defaults, so it is good that Daniel and the Team are aware of this problem with tied grace notes.