I typed a piece in from scratch today. I have 2 bars out of 108 that are showing the wrong number of beats. Tried a bunch of things (toggling to differing time signatures, etc.) and the correct number of beats will not appear. Any suggestions? Does Dorico allow the wrong number of beats in a bar (like Finale) or disallow it (like Sibelius)? I believe it is the latter.
AFIAK Dorico will not let you create a bar with more music than the current time signature, but you can create a bar with less music, just as you can in both Finale and Sibelius. That is “normal notation” for pickup bars, before and after repeat marks, etc.
One way to make your attachment in Dorico would be to create the first bar in 4/4 time and then create a 9/8 time signature before the end of the first bar.
Yes, Dorico will quite happily allow you to create time signatures at any rhythmic position, including in the middle of an existing bar, which will of course create a barline at that position, and potentially cause the bar into which the barline was inserted to end up with the wrong duration.
We don’t plan to change this basic philosophy, but we do plan to add various checks and balances to help you fix things up if that’s not what you intended.
Thanks, I was able to sort it out, but as a currently novice level user it was not fast or straightforward for me to do so. Any hints or guidance I can use today before the checks and balances are in place would be appreciated, as I really messed up my score trying to “fix it” before I was able to get it back the way I intended.
Don’t forget, you can always make a copy (backup?) of the score before experimenting. And at this stage in Dorico’s development, experimenting can be a valuable tool learning the in’s and out’s of the program.
Has there been any further work to detect situations where you mistakenly removed a beat (or beats) from a bar. This is very difficult to see in a large score.
No, at the moment not.