MIDI Export Instrument / Gap Closure

[lukesneeringer]

Hi Dorico folks,
I have been converting all my notation to Dorico over the last 5-6 weeks, and I’m beyond pleased. However, I’ve encountered a problem I can’t figure out how to solve.

My use case is simple enough: I’m a church liturgist, and I engrave music for singing in church. I have a new need to export MIDI files with four separate parts (corresponding to SATB).

I’ve engraved numerous hymns with the four parts separated already, using the Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass instruments. I then use Copy → Paste (Reduce) to make a piano-based engraving that I export to SVG to print in bulletins. When I had the need for the four-separated-parts MIDI, I thought, “Great, I’ll just use the split parts.”

It almost works. I’ve posted a project with a single hymn so you can see what I have:
Christ the Life of All the Living.dorico (1.6 MB)

Ideally, I want to go into the “Choral” view (which has the separated parts) and export to MIDI. It works fine, but the MIDI is not formed in the way that my counter-party expects. In particular, it has weird “tick”-like breaks between each note.

I don’t know how to explain this better, except to post an image from GarageBand:

301 - Christ, the Life of All the Living.mid (3.2 KB)

See those vertical, dark green lines? Apparently they shouldn’t be there. So, as an experiment, I went and changed the instrument from the S/A/T/B to “Piano”. (That means my instruments were Piano, Piano II, Piano III, and Piano IV.) I did the same MIDI export.

It “solved” the problem (albeit creating new ones):

Christ the Life of All the Living - Choral - Hymn.mid (2.4 KB)

But, even if I ignore the pain factor of converting a bunch of scores, this change creates several new problems, such as moving staves from bass clef to treble (with absurdly low notes). I haven’t yet found the right solution.

I considered trying to make new instruments that otherwise corresponded to the SATB instruments but use a piano as their playback, but I can’t seem to figure out how to do this.

Alternatively, maybe there’s an option I can set in Dorico to make the instruments I have not cause this gap?

I’d greatly appreciate any tribal wisdom.

[Derrek]

I have no idea what the vertical lines in your first image represent, but perhaps the note-lengths section of Playback Options is what you are looking for to create a more legato sound.

Realize, too, that one can set up four piano players (that sound like pianos, but then change the Player Names to SATB to use on the printed score. Once could also set up a choral score on two staves and use separate voices on the two staves to export separate vocal lines as separate sounds (using Independent Voice Playback) when needed.

[lukesneeringer]

@Derrek

Realize, too, that one can set up four piano players (that sound like pianos, but then change the Player Names to SATB to use on the printed score.

This is what I will do if it’s the best solution. I just don’t relish the prospect of doing it a bunch of times to all my existing scores.

[lukesneeringer]

I can’t say I understand why, but it appears the solution was to change this:

…to this: