I’m writing an opera in several scenes, or flows. In each new scene, each character (and instrument) acquires a number corresponding to the flow. Faustus 1, Faustus 2, etc. Piano 1, Pno 2. (No problem with the abbreviations - but I’d really like to lose the number! It’s the same character in all scenes!)
Could you share your project (probably a copy without notes is sufficient if you don’t want to share your work).
Or for starters a screenshot of the setup page?
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Sounds like you have created a duplicate player for each flow. Did you perhaps import each as an xml? If so, Dorico may do this if it cannot reconcile instruments. And the solution is just to move material to the correct Player and delete the duplicate.
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Yes indeed. Each scene was a separate Finale file, which I then imported as an xml file. Actually I was astonished at how well it worked…apart from this problem. I’m thinking that the least cumbersome way to fix the problem would be to save a copy, eliminate everything except the piano part (so I don’t have to re-enter all the time signatures!) and then build from scratch, and copy and paste from my current version. All suggestions welcomed. (I should mention that this is very much a work in progress….)
You could do the following to merge those players into one. First, in Setup mode select the player marked 1, e.g. Country Woman 1:
Note that in the bottom panel, only flow 1 is checked. So the next step is to check all other flows as well for that player:
Then, go to Write mode, Galley view. You can skip straight to Flow 2. Select everything in that flow for the Country Woman 2 player, cut and paste into Country Woman 1. Repeat that for each flow with the corresponding player numer (Flow 3, move notes from Country Woman 3 to 1, in Flow 4 CW 4 to 1, etc.). When you’ve done that for all flows you can delete players 2 through 5 in Setup mode (the number 1 will then disappear from the last remaining player). Repeat for every player.
There are some other XML-related things going on though, e.g. a lot of bars are completely empty (the bar rests are not shown). This is caused by the fact that the first note (or ‘forced’ rest) in that flow for each player has the Start voice property activated. So you have to find and select the first note (for CW 1 that is bar 429), open the Properties panel and deactivate that property. Also some bars don’t have the right amount of beats (e.g. bar 428 in Flow 1 which is an eighth note short). You can fix that with Shift+B and entering +1e.
Also lyrics colliding with notes, some clef issues here and there. I seldom import XML files so I don’t know the fastest way to clean those things up, but others surely will.
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Many thanks! It was just too big a project to contemplate writing it all out again, and I wanted to move it to Dorico… so I think xml was the right solution for me. The other issues, I think, are easily fixed, but this one was a head-scratcher. Much appreciated!
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Yes. However, given the number of flows and the number of players/instruments involved, I would recommend sorting out Flow2 before importing Flow 3 (etc.). So you only have deal with one set of duplicates at a time.
It is straightforward to do, but does require care.
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When you import an xml flow (file, in your case) into an existing Dorico file, Dorico will ask hou if you want to merge with the existing instruments… It’s not a 100% match but it will reduce the amount of correction. I ‘m with Janus about making sure flow N is ok before importing flow N+1 !
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It’s all done! Once again, a big sigh of relief and much gratitude.
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