Is it Possible to "Reset" Condensing?

Dorico
1

Hi, all.

Seems like each time I post a topic on here it’s about condensing: either I still haven’t gotten the hang of all its nuances, or it can’t quite do what I hope just yet (I understand it’s constantly being developed and improved).

Is there a way to globally ‘re-set’ the condensing for my piece without starting a new file and re-building my work? I’ve updated several times since condensing was introduced (running latest 3.5.12) so it’s possible that the improvements mean many of my manual condensing changes are no longer needed.

I have a 4-flow work for orchestra, and last I counted, this piece (795 bars total) has 257 forced condensing changes that I’ve had to put in. There are cases, like in the attached images, where I need multiple in a single bar, or in every bar of a phrase, to get the correct behavior of slurs, dynamics, and player entrances (the vast majority are to fix slurs or rogue “1.” and “2.” that appear all over the place even though voices are shown and stemmed correctly.

If I had been able to set them once and forget it, fine, but sometimes I change notes, articulations, or dynamics, and it adds new glitches, at which point I need to comb through the entire score again to find them and see if it’s correct. Other times, I add a condensing changes and it affects a different bar upstream or downstream, so I have to go hunting there, too.

In this example, I need all of these condensing changes to force the winds to show ‘a2’, to force the horn slurs to amalgamate, and to force the trombones to show ‘a2’ even though they have exactly the same music. Despite this, the trumpet slur in bar 99 and horn slur in bar 1000 are impossible to correct, no matter what I try:

image
image1056×751 104 KB

In this example, all three condensing changes are used to force the bassoons to amalgamate stems and slurs. The second one is used to force the trumpets to amalgamate, and the third seems to be the ONLY plate in this phrase where I can place one to force the flutes to amalgamate:

image
image1162×420 76.1 KB

Thanks!

2

Regarding the horn parts: It seems as if horn 1 has different dynamic markings (showing the “< fff” above the staff") from horn 2, which has no “fff” at the end of the bar?

3

It’s certainly true that Dorico’s use of rests as a crude means of splitting up the music into phrases has its limits, and in music like this where you have lots of abutting phrases denoted by slurs but without being split by rests, Dorico’s judgement about what phrases are present in the music – and thus its opportunities to change the condensing automatically at those points – is rather limited.

I’m not suggesting that you should rewrite your music to include more rests! But that’s definitely why you would need more condensing changes than we would expect or ideally want.

4

Thanks, Daniel. I suspected it was largely a result of how Dorico determine phrase limits. Is there a way to globally re-set all of the condensing my score and have Dorico “re-analyze” it from scratch, on the off chance some of the changes I’ve made have improved things?

5

Good catch, I can’t believe I hadn’t seen that in all the times I’ve reviewed the score and parts!

1 Like
6

You could Select All and Filter Condensing Changes, then delete, or you could select one, Select More a few times and then delete.

7

I’ve never played with the selection filter. I’ll give that a go. Deleting all of the condensing changes will effectively bring me back to a ‘from scratch’ condensed score?

8

It takes you back to a condensed score where the condensing is controlled entirely by the global options at Notation Options > Condensing. As a rule of thumb, try to get those right for as much of the material as possible before overriding (with Condensing Changes).

9

Thanks, I’ll delete them all and give all of the options a really thorough investigation.

10

Another question about the selection filter. I moved a bunch of hairpins and dynamics around for a previous print of the score and now that I’ve changed some stuff, those overrides are messing with the layouts of several pages. Will Edit → Reset Appearance work? If so, how do I use it? I can’t Select All in Engrave mode…

11

If you’re selecting all and filtering, do it in Write mode. Reset Position and Reset Appearance both also work in Write mode.