missing rest and phantom time signature...

please see the attached screen shot. unclear how to correct for a missing 8th note. this looks like a glitch.

also, here’s a set of measures where it goes from 4/4 to 3/4 without a change of time signature:


Sorry, but can you be a bit more specific about what you’re talking about with these examples? I’m not seeing anything missing.

really? in one screen shot the first measure is clearly in 4/4 (the time signature is off to the left, off screen) while the following measure is in ¾ (no time signature change). in the other screen shot ⅛ note is missing in the measure that’s supposed to be 4/4.

Dorico wouldn’t be so useful if you couldn’t create “irregular bars” when you want them (the obvious example is pickup bars) - but presumably you have done this by accident somehow.

It’s hard to tell you how to “correct” the score when we don’t know what you want the correction to look like. It’s not obvious (at least to me) whether

  • The barlines are the right places, but are some notes (or rests) are missing, or
  • The rhythm of the notes is correct but the barlines and/or time signatures are wrong
  • or some combination of both of the above, of course.

You can create a new bar line and/or time signature at any rhythmic position in the score. If you create it with the mouse, it’s easy to click in the wrong place and make the previous bar the wrong length. A better way is to select the first note of the “new” bar first, then create the barline / time signature.

Unlike some other programs, creating a new time signature doesn’t change the rhythm of the notes by adding rests to fill up a bar.

So a general strategy to fix the problem would be

  • Add any missing notes or rests using insert mode (press I)
  • delete the incorrect barlines and/or time signatures (select them, press Delete)
  • Create new barlines and/or time signatures in the right place(s).

Ok I see the missing eighth note in the second one.

The first one is 4/4 going to 3/8, not 3/4. You’re saying you didn’t enter the 3/8 time signature and it just generated itself (again, your post was very short and unclear)?

ok. the first screen shot has four beats in measure 14 (the time signature off-page is 4/4). measure 15 has 3 beats in quarter-note time without a time signature change. measure 16 is in ⅜ time with the correct number of beats (and correct time signature). i have corrected measure 15 with the appropriate time signature but i’m unclear why it was wrong in the first place.

the second screen shot is more troubling. it shows a 4/4 measure with an incomplete number of eight-notes (7 instead of 8). i’m not quite sure how to correct this measure (i have one more in this piece). i can’t seem to add another eighth-note to that measure.

this music is an xml import from Finale. the Finale file does not have these errors.

Finale is well-known for not caring about the correct amount of music in each bar. To be fair, in can give you warning messages, but only if you switch them on, and I think it only warns about too much music in a bar, not too little. It will even let you get away with different amounts of music on different staves in the same bar!

If it’s your Finale file, I would start by checking carefully in Finale that the barring is correct and all the bars really have the right amount of music, then export the MusicXML again.

To fix in in Dorico you need to add an 8th rest to the music (in insert mode). That will push all the music half a beat past the bar lines, not increase the length of a bar, so you then have to fix up the bar lines.

Then try deleting the 4/4 time signature and re-creating it. You might have to re-create all the time signature changes to the end of the score, unfortunately.

The Finale file may have been correct in Finale but imported incorrectly (not blaming Dorico for this). I tried importing a Finale file via XML yesterday, and it had a lot of dropped notes and added quarter rests. Don’t know whether layers contributed to the improper XML or not.