I am one of the Finale refugees and I’m trying to get a score from Finale to Dorico using the musicXML format.
However, when I import the score into Dorico it only brings in about 30 or so measures. The rest of the scores is just a bunch of blank measures. There doesn’t appear to be any data in those measures. I’ve tried using various options in Finale to export the score in different musicXML formats but nothing is working.
I would appreciate any ideas you may have because recreating the score in Dorico would take an extremely long time.
You could attach it here for someone to look at it.
Or see if Finale itself can import it back into itself (or import Musescore or any other) to see what happens.
This happens when there is an incorrectly notated rhythm or other problem in the original file. Dorico is unforgiving with such errors. Look at the spot where the empty measures begin. That will be your trouble area. If all else fails, you could make a copy of the original file, delete the problem measure, then export it again into MusXML and import it into Dorico. Perhaps the issue occurs only in this one area, and you can then re-engrave that one spot in Dorico.
The triplet issue wasn’t precisely the problem but it led me down the path to discover that Dorico and Finale handle grace notes differently.
It appears that Finale treats grace note runs like a musician would. It considers the metrical placement of the landing note and places all grace notes leading into it evenly spaced from 1/2 the value of the beat as indicated in the time signature (for example, an eighth-note in the case of a 4/4 time signature). Finale doesn’t care whether your grace notes are beamed using eighths, sixteenths, thirty-secondths, etc.)
It appears that Dorico treats grace notes in the opposite manner. It needs to know where to start a grace note run by back calculating the specific metrical values of the grace notes. I can see how my circumstance was unusual because in most instances, a grace note run among instruments is often the same metrical value (i.e. all sixteenths or eighths, etc.)
However, in my circumstance I had grace note runs in 2 different instruments with 2 different metrical values: one of the runs was in sixteenths and the other was in thirty-secondths. So, while Finale would just start each run at 1/2 the value of the beat regardless of the number of notes in the run, Dorico needed to compare the metrical values of each grace note run in order to determine how to interpret the measure. And that is where it fell apart.
I had to delete the offending notation completely because I couldn’t force Finale to consider the metrical values of the grace notes and will have to recreate the measures in Dorico.
I’ll post a screenshot of the end result, as soon as I learn how to create this exact sequence of notes in Dorico. So, it might take me a day as I still don’t have Dorico’s note entry methodology figured out, and have never attempted to create grace note runs in Dorico.
As you can see in measure 71, Dorico still isn’t able to place the grace notes correctly, but I can’t figure out if there’s a way to fix it other than to manually place the notes in the correct positions in Engraver mode.
They at least appear correctly in the parts as evenly spaced, so the performers will likely perform it correctly. And if I can fix the appearance in the Conductor’s Score then at least it will look correct to everyone involved even if it doesn’t play correctly in Dorico…but accurate MIDI playback is a lower priority than correct notation for live performance.
