Making stems in Dorico (audio mixing)

Dorico
1

This, as the title says, is about audio mixing stems. I believe the youth of today use them for mixing loops and suchlike, but they also have their uses in media work.

I’ve been thinking about making stems in Dorico, and immediately run into the obvious problem: stems are routine parts of notation and accordingly posts about stems in the Dorico forum are generally about this kind of stem.

I’m presently making custom score layouts, simple wood/brass/strings etc.

  1. I wondered if there’s a quick way to add instruments to the custom score? I’ve only been able to do it one at a time.

  2. There doesn’t appear to be an option to select custom layouts using the players-as-separate-files list. Is that something that might be available in the future?

2

You can use click followed by Shift+click on the checkboxes in the Players panel to add a contiguous selection of players to any selected layout, including a custom score layout, but you’ll still have to wait as Dorico churns through the edits, so although it prevents you from having to click them one by one, it’s not actually any quicker in a large project. (Improving the speed of Setup mode operations is something we plan to do, though it’s not a simple job.)

I’m not sure what you mean by the “players-as-separate-files” list. Can you be more specific about what you’re talking about?

3

I was probably getting ahead of myself, Daniel, imagining that if it became possible to export stems simultaneously (in the sense of all by a single command), then the place to list the stem sources would be in the export players as separate files list.

4

Returning to this, as a current project involves making loops for use with Wwise.

I’ve got a file with three flows, each a variant of the other, so identical in terms of routing, effects etc. It has these groups:
winds, drums, tuned percussion, synths, and voices. I’ve set up custom scores for each and I’m exporting them one at a time.

Ideally I would like to be able to set Dorico the task of exporting all five custom scores in one go, creating a subfolder for each custom score. At present, I need to do quite a bit of intervention creating folders and so on.