Library manager not properly substituting custom music symbols

Dorico
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In the screenshot below, I am trying to match a project to a previous project that has some custom clefs, which I had substituted using the Musc Symbols editor.

The current and updated clef display correctly in the Library manager, but when I click Apply, the clefs vanish in the score. Unfortunately I can’t share the project or the offending clefs, which I realize is of limited usefulness. Just bringing this to the team’s attention.

In the meantime obviously I can make the necesary substitution again via the Music Symbols editor, but there was lot of custom positioning and scaling that is required, so I’d prefer to just use the Library Manager.

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PS: I just want to say that, this hiccup aside, the Library Manager is absolutely brilliant. I haven’t had much occasion to use it before now, but it’s so well done. Thank you.

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I have no idea why Library Manager isn’t working here. I use it a lot to update older files to my current settings and it usually seems to work fine. If it won’t read correctly from that file and you don’t want to reenter all the settings, you might be able to trick it into working by temporarily making that your default.

  1. Backup (or quickly add to a zip) your userlibrary.xml file that lives in Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 4
  2. Open the file with the modified clef.
  3. Go to Music Symbols, click that clef and hit the Save as Default star. (This writes the settings for this into your userlibrary.xml file)
  4. You may need to restart Dorico, I’m not sure, but it can’t hurt.
  5. Open the file you wish to change.
  6. In Library Manager you should now be able to compare the file to your User Library which now contains that clef.
  7. Copy the Music Symbol settings for that glyph.
  8. Restore your original userlibrary.xml file

If that’s a glyph you often want to start with, you can even make a doricolib file with those settings too that you can drag in or out of DefaultLibraryAdditions (or unzip) as needed.

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4

Thanks Todd, thankfully in this case all the other settings (Engraving, Layout, Notation, Paragraph Styles, etc) transferred fine except for those clefs, and I ended up doing them manually. Once I had the settings memorized for scaling and X/Y offsets, it went pretty quickly.

I did end up making a template file with those clefs already substituted for future use.

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Glad you got it working! Is that clef SMuFL? Just curious. There is an entry called isSmufl under the GlyphPrimitiveEntityDefinition entry under glyphDefinitions. I wonder if there’s some sort of disconnect if one clef is SMuFL and one isn’t. I just tested with a few other SMuFL clefs and they all seemed to copy correctly using the Library Manager.

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It’s not SMuFL, no. It was a custom clef from a client that I just imported as an SVG; we’re experimenting at the beginning of a big project. First pass… the treble clef was awful, lol.

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