Hi all,
I had a problem importing musicxml files created from soundslice into Dorico. Everything worked fine, except for missing chord symbols. I’ve tried importing the same files into musescore, and the chords are indeed there, somewhere…
I’ve ensured that chord symbols should be visible on all layouts.
14—BANU-CHOSHECH-L-GAREISH-LYRICS-AND-LATKES-2022-pdf.xml (38.3 KB)
The problem is that SoundSlice is specifying that the “kind” of every chord symbol is “other”, and Dorico doesn’t know how to handle this. I’ll talk to Adrian at SoundSlice about this, and we’ll see if we can work together to improve chord symbol import from SoundSlice in future.
Amazing, thank you for looking into this!
I just noticed that Soundslice made some updates a few days ago, and I can confirm that MusicXML export seems to export chord symbols compatible with Dorico. Many thanks!
Yes, this is all due to the amazing responsiveness of Adrian and his colleagues at SoundSlice. I mentioned it to him and he worked on it the very next day. He’s brilliant (and so is SoundSlice!).
Hi, I’m still having trouble with missing chord symbols when importing music.xml from Soundslice. I am visually impaired, so I often need larger sheet music with a specific layout, such as a larger staff size and larger chord symbols. I first converted existing sheet music PDFs to XML using Soundslice, and then I edited them further in Dorico to add my specific layout. Initially, the sheet music, including the chord symbols, is recognized correctly in Soundslice. However, after exporting to XML and opening the file in Dorico, most of the chord symbols are missing. Am I doing something wrong?
I have attached a screenshot of the PDF conversion in Soundslice, the generated XML file, and the Dorico file after importing.
James-Metheny-Piano-pdf-3.xml (251.2 KB)
James-Metheny-Piano.dorico (879.8 KB)
Did you open this file in a text editor and look at it? If you do, you’ll see Soundslice is exporting the chord symbols as other,so Dorico has no way of knowing the quality:
According to this specification, that value should be major-seventh not other. Until Soundslice exports chord symbols correctly, Dorico or any other notation software won’t be able to import them.
Thank you FredGunn!
In the meantime, I had also contacted Soundslice and received a prompt and helpful reply from Adrian, which I am happy to post here:
»We’ve just improved our MusicXML exporter to handle most of the chord names you were using there. If you do a fresh export, you should have better luck within Dorico. In case you’re curious: the issue is that Soundslice stores chords very flexibly (basically any set of characters), whereas Dorico’s MusicXML import requires that the chord be encoded in a specific way (the exact semantic harmony, such as “minor seventh”). Our exporter handles this for common chord types, but your particular slice had different spellings of chord names that we weren’t yet handling — such as “Gma9” instead of “Gmaj9” for example. At any rate, give it another shot.«
