Loaded template but no music staff appeared - How to add at least one measure?

New to Dorico 5 on a win 10 PC and I had created a drum template with eleven measures trying out different techniques with only a drum set loaded as one player. It played back as expected. I saved it and closed the project using the red X (top right corner). The window closed and that was that. Dorico did not reopen the startup screen (HUB) and I could not get Dorico to start again from any of the pathways (Start menu, task bar, shortcut icon). Thus I figured it crashed again. (not the first time upon closing a project).

I returned to try again the next day and after turning the computer on and starting Dorico. The Drum Set Template was sitting in the recent projects showing the thumbnail with the filled in measures and I double clicked to open the file. The file opened and the flow and the only thing showing was the title “Drum Set Template” and not measures. Not even a starting empty measure.

I added another player under Setup to see if that would populate a measure and it did not. Checking the individual players showed a complete black screen where you would normally see music. Only the Full Score showed the first page with the title.

Under the Play section under routing, there was no options to select HAlion Sonic, Groove Agent SE, etc. of which I have installed.

Is there a way to add the starting bar to the template so I can start notating or do I just scrap this file and start over?

Drum Set Template.dorico (1.3 MB)




Hi @PercussionistGlenn, you don’t have any flow in your project.

Go in Setup mode, and from the bottom panel, click on Add Flow and magically all will be good again :slight_smile: . Rename the Flow to Flow 1 (in case it is called Flow 2). You can see that the flow now exists also in the Project Infos:

This happened because you didn’t check Preserve existing flows in the Save As Project Template dialogue, when you first saved the Template.
Resave your template in the desired Category and with a Name (*) and be sure to check Preserve existing Flows and Preserve Project Info checkboxes!).
So the Template has not only your Players and Layouts but also the Flow/s and the Project Title etc,:

(*) (if you use the same name, Dorico will warn you that the name is already present in your Templates, but clicking Save, it will overwrite the previous wrong Template, or you can give a different name, and you can change the name afterwards and also delete the wrong template in the Project Templates folder that you find

  • on MacOS /Users/your-username/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 5
  • on Windows under C:\Users\your-username\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 5.

After doing that, restart Dorico so that it can reload the changed names)

1 Like

Thank you @ Christian_R!
This is the perfect answer and a great video you added to accompany your response. I did exactly what you said and the starting measure appeared.
The only thing missing was the original measures with the notes, but that can be redone easily enough. Hope this will help others that find themselves in the same boat. Thanks again! :hugs: