Dorico is treating playback of a slur into a staccato with a space between the notes instead of using a legato overlap:
Since all notes are marked “Natural”, I’ll wager you are using the wrong Expression Map., possibly the one called “Default”, which is not for the Horn.
Craig, I think you’re right that Dorico ends the legato with the second note, rather than creating a transition to the third note. I’m sure this is designed behaviour, but I’ll make a note for us to review it in due course.
The break in playback before the staccato note seems universal. It would be great if the playback behaviour could be amended so a staccato on the last note doesn’t “end” the slur prematurely but simply shortens its duration. Multiple staccatos within a slur is a different matter of course, implying a re-bow or re-tongue.
If the last note inside a slur is staccato, then the workaround to prevent the slur from ending prematurely is to set the Playback end offset property of the penultimate note inside the slur. This offset is measured in ticks, and Dorico uses 480 ticks per quarter note.
By default, the played duration of a legato note is 105% of its written duration. Using the example in the first post of this topic, the played duration of the second sixteenth note needs to be extended by 5% of its written duration, so its Playback end offset should be set to 0.05 Ă— 120 = 6:
To eliminate the humanization of the start and end positions of notes in Dorico 6, you can go to Library > Playback Options > Timing > Note Positions and set both options to zero.
Thanks for the tip, John - good to know! It’s interesting to find these little instances where default Dorico behaviour doesn’t match common practice.