I have imported a xml-file into Dorico and found some slurs, which I can´t identify. That means I don´t know if they are slurs or ties. When I select the “slur” , the note to the left is always selected too, but not the note to the right. If it were a slur, it should be selectable without the notes. If it were a tie, it should be selected with both notes to the right and the left.
But it is neither the first nor the last. So, what is it?
In_My_Life_-_The_Beatles_Piano_Solo.dorico.zip (440 KB)
Does the tie icon show in the left panel?
I’ve looked now. They’re ties. You can hit U to untie them.
Yes, I can untie them with U. But why is the note indicated as dotted quarter note? And why is the right note not selected too, when I select the tie? I have no idea , what kind of note -value it is.
The MusicXML file has come in with only one voice on the stave. If you were notating it from scratch you’d almost definitely use an upstem voice for the long note and a downstem voice for the short notes.
Dorico can only display what you’ve imported - if that work hasn’t been done, Dorico won’t do it for you.
I have checked the note with the tie in the pianoroll. There it is a dotted quarter note and the tie doesn´t exist. It seems to be a nonsense tie without meaning for the length of the note. That´s quite confusing.
The tie is indeed nonsense in that it’s a tie from a dotted quarter to an eighth with a half note gap in the middle.
Upload the XML file and somebody might be able to give you some pointers - the chances are that Dorico is doing exactly what the MusicXML file tells it to do.
Just a guess: I wonder if in the original it was a l.v. marking, and somehow MusicXML and/or Dorico has decided it is a genuine tie.
My guess is that it’s a MIDI recording from an application that isn’t very good at notating MIDI recording. Possibly Logic…
Actually it’s something cobbled together in MuseScore - apparently by someone who doesn’t know much about music notation.
Ah yes. Complete with the nonsensical tie.
Well you can’t fault Dorico for importing the MusicXMl file verbatim.
Ties in Dorico are not just a graphical thing, they have a very special purpose. (As we are told by the team time and time again 
) They extend a single note event over the first note’s visual duration. So in Dorico’s own logic, when the note event is as long as the first note, there cannot be a tie - per definition.
So in the end I’d like to call this a bug in Dorico, as it fails at the point where note durations have already been established and Dorico should then know that there is no need for any tie.
Estigy, Dorico has displayed exactly what the MusicXMl file told it to display. There are plenty of things in MusicXML files that aren’t natively possible in Dorico, such as instruments with silly transpositions.
It’s all very well calling this a bug, but if Dorico’s behaviour changed there’d bound to be someone who would complain that Dorico didn’t display the ties as dictated by the MusicXML file they’d imported.
I see what you are saying, panoleo, but I deepheartedly disagree.
Dorico has gone a different way than other similar programs, and most of us agree that this is a very good way. On MusicXML import it has to translate what is given there into Dorico’s scheme of handling stuff. And since ties are a very (very) specific thing, I think it is strange for the software to leave the Dorico Way Of Doing Things there and switch over to “it’s in the XML so let’s just paint it, whatevah”.
Or to give a more technical view on the topic: Ties are just the result of a single note event being split into multiple notes based on time signature, beat grouping, force duration etc. To have a tie at the end of a note that is not connected to another note is totally impossible per definition.
Notation like the attachment is standard and normal in classical music. One of the nice things about Dorico is that it does this automatically, unlike other notation software where you have to fake it and it doesn’t play back properly either.
That is no different to what Dorico did importing the MusicXML file, except the notation wasn’t used in a sensible way.
In any case, as the link in my previous post shows, the original Musescore file contained EXACTLY the same notation as Dorico produced.
Except Dorico already breaks that rule, when you manually tie a G# to an Ab, for example, or when you tie a note in one voice to a note in another voice.