Instrument Doubling in "Setup" Mode Not Reflected in "Play" Mode

Greetings, I am very new to Dorico (unhappy Sibelius user for years), but I have recently transitioned from Dorico 2 to version 3 and have noticed that doubled instruments in “Setup” mode are not reflected in “Play” mode as sub-nested folders like they were in Dorico 2.

My questions are:

  1. Is there a reason for this change?,
  2. Is there way to revert to that version 2 functionality (I’ve looked in manual under both the “Setup” and “Play” chapters, as well as in Preferences and have nothing about this)?,
  3. Is this a bug?

Although this GUI change doesn’t affect the deeper aspects of end point production, I feel that the way Dorico 2 handled folder nesting of doubled instruments was a much more elegant approach/solution. Please see attachments, and thanks for any perspective on this. Cheers, Christian.


IIRC this was the result of a request by some users to reduce (halve) the number of clicks needed to reach an instrument for configuration. Admittedly, if your vertical screen space is limited, this may require some adjustment of your working routine.

Christian, I’m sorry you find this change unhelpful. There was no functional benefit to having the additional hierarchical layer for players in Play mode, so we removed them in order to streamline the interface. Perhaps there’s another way you can achieve the same benefits in the new approach: can you say a little more about what you were using the player level for?

Maybe, and this is just an idea, nesting ONLY players that have doubling instruments? And maybe make a global or project option to enable/disable this?

Part of the intention in Play mode is that the focus is very different to Setup and Write mode. Setup and Write mode are about Players, to which Instruments are assigned. Play Mode is focussed on the Instruments, since each instrument has to be routed to a separate channel of a plugin. The organisation of Instruments into Players we think isn’t quite as useful in Play Mode. It led to the extra level of nesting, and there wasn’t anything that you could usefully do in a Player lane.

There are some situations, like Clarinets in Bb and A, where there is unlikely to be any difference in the playback setup between the two instruments held by a player (unless you have a very comprehensive sample library).

But I agree it’s hardly worth making such things a special case!

Dorico’s playback model is that Instruments are routed separately so this would result in separate patches being loaded, even though in this particular case they would be same.