I’m working on an opera. At the moment the opera is in around 30 Dorico files. I want to stitch the whole thing together into one Dorico file. I created a new file with all the players, both instrumentalists and singers. The singers I created as you’d imagine: for example I made a Soprano, named the player “Rose” (the character) and also did an “Edit names…” on the Rose player’s instrument, to also call it “Rose”. This makes the singers be labeled nicely on the score.
I then planned to import all the other sections of the opera as new flows. On import I “Merge with Existing Players Where Possible”. All of the instrumental parts have (so far) imported nicely into the corresponding instruments.
The singers do not. Instead what I’m seeing is that the first, say, soprano staff of the imported flow is assigned to the first soprano player. So, for example, importing a chorus movement will assign the chorus’s “Soprano” part into the “Rose” player rather than the pre-defined “Soprano” player.
Is there some way I should be setting up my singers to avoid this?
Thanks!
Greg
Don’t worry. Make sure Rose and the other singers from your first flow are included (ticked) in the subsequent flows, then copy-paste the content of the added singers in their “originally wanted” place, and you’ll see it’s fine. Then get rid of all those useless players.
Rinse and repeat with any other instrument that has not merged.
Thanks for the tip. However, I was really hoping for a solution that didn’t require me to copy-paste 18 singer parts from 30 Dorico files. In my (sad) experience, mass copy-pasting is a dangerous source of potential error.
It’s actually quite long but quite safe. You can create a shortcut to select Until the end of Flow (so you’re sure the whole staff is selected), copy and paste on the wanted staff (in galley view, of course). There is nothing I can think about that could cause any harm, except for the time lost…
FWIW it’s one of the first big things I have done in Dorico… Version 1 did not work well enough, I think I managed to get the whole Aladino (Nino Rota) vocal score as one file in Dorico 2 or 3. Now it’s improved so much it will work, it’s so reliable. Back then it was a vocal score, now I’m doing the same with full score+piano reduction 
One side note to copy-pasting staves: selecting the entire staff in a flow will not select its ossia staves. I don’t know if there are any other exceptions.
I’ve worked out a process that doesn’t require copy-pasting. In the Dorico file I want to import, I remove any players who have no notes. I edit all player definitions to match the names and score order of the Dorico file I’m importing into. Then, in that Dorico file (the one for the entire opera), I rearrange the singers so that the singer players to be imported are placed above all other singers in the score, and that they appear in the same score order as in the file to be imported.
After doing all that, an Import Flow will assign the singers to their proper staves. I then have to rearrange my singer players back into regular score order. But this is a lot less work than copy-pasting 1-10+ staves for each of 30 files.
My conclusion from this is that Dorico matches up the first instrument from the imported flow with the first instrument of the same type, i.e. the first flute it finds get assigned to Flute 1, and etc for all other flutes. But it also does this for singers, so that the first soprano of an imported file (let’s call her “Honey”) gets assigned to the first soprano stave in the file doing the importing (“Rose”). This process makes sense for flutes but not for named singers, because it assumes, incorrectly, that singers are both fungible (a soprano is a soprano) and the list of singers is the same for every imported file. This is not true for opera.
1 Like
You’re right! I ran into this as well; it appears that all things being identical between documents, the information for a given instrument will populate starting with the first staff of that instrument in the destination file. For example, if you want to import a flow with content in “Voice 4”, it will automatically import into “Voice 1” if the other players/instruments were deactivated from the source flow.
Unfortunately, it seems that Player Name info isn’t included in the data of exporting a flow. I really wish it would.
In the meantime, it seems there are two solutions:
- You can activate all instruments in all flows before exporting/importing and then deactivate ones you don’t need later.
- You can make each vocal staff a new custom instrument that corresponds to the player names you want.
(One other thing: The custom instrument approach also allows the names to appear in the “manual staff visibility” menu and in Galley view. Because even if you have the score to show player names instead, it won’t apply to these views.)