MusicXML Newbee: Sibelius 7 to Dorico 5

Sorry, as sure this topic has been beat to death.

Rarely use MusicXML after shift to Dorico.

But I have an old Sib big band file I’d like to bring into Dorico. Did the transfer, and pretty messy.

I can live with the Sib file only, but wonder if there’s a bit of wisdom that might help the process. Don’t expect a press-the-button, and magic happens.

Thanks Much!

John Chester

Well that’s not going to get you sensible advice. Post the XML and someone might be able to help.

My advice is to go the application Prefs and uncheck most of the options for XML import. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it means that Dorico is free to do what it wants (which you can then define easily in the Options), rather than locking itself to the beaming/layout etc of the original.

I leave Text on, and that’s about it.

Otherwise, you’ll need to show us a picture, at least, of what’s gone wrong.

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Thank you!

All the application Prefs had been unchecked. I checked them all, and imported again. No change.

Tried to upload the whole Dorico file, but too large. Here’s a screenshot sample of what I’m getting. Also, repeat bars didn’t come thru.

Thanks again.

I’m guessing those notes aren’t supported to be like that?

Select All and Press O to turn off Force Duration. But it looks like you’ve got a tiny note ‘out’ somewhere earlier, which is affecting everything that follows.

You could upload the XML?

Here’s the MusicXML file.

I don’t see force duration under MusicXML in Dorico Edit>Preferences

John
Minor Blues (Big Band) (Fall 2014 DeAnza Jazz Piano Class)- 2.xml (3.5 MB)

Force Duration is an option in the Write menu. Other, separate checkboxes would try to preserve the XML notation during import.

OK. The XML files goes wrong at bar 28, because of this:

So your bar is 4 beats of a quarter and a tiny bit…!!

I’ve managed to clean it up, but there’s still some problems later on in one of the instruments, which you may have to re-enter.

Minor Blues Revised.dorico (1.4 MB)

John, there are two ways to export a Sibelius file to .xml
First there is Sibelius’s built in xml conversion, which does a decent job. Still it is advisable to get the newest Dolet Plugin into Sibelius, which does a much better job in catching all your notation details.
In your case I would try the Dolet Plugin (newest version) for a better .xml export.
You might get a better result , when importing that into Dorico.

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You can download the Dolet plugin here:

Jesper

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Wow!!! You guys are great! How did you do that?!!!

I’m using Dorico only now, and have forgotten my Sibelius stuff.

I’ll clean it up, and try your suggestions.

Great!

Thanks again! :}

John

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the new Dolet isn’t compatible with Sibelius 7 which you say you have. I found the older version if anything worse than native Sibelius export. But all this is in the past as I did my last Sib conversion some time ago and Dorico import has changed and improved in the meantime. A few have certainly found that Dolet 8 (which works from Sib Ultimate 2019.5 or later) is the current way to go.

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