New computer build behind me, I had to reinstall everything from scratch including Dorico. For Dorico this gives me a unique opportunity to rebuild my custom Playing Techniques and Playback Techniques from a “virgin” state. I am approaching this with much more care than I have previously. I am documenting what I do in a spreadsheet, and I don’t want to box myself into a corner.
To this point I haven’t really trusted and used the Library Manager, specifically the ability to import PB & PBT from other projects. I guess I’m concerned about unintended consequences.
What I’m hoping to achieve now is to build out the techniques in one master project, then use Library Manager to transfer them from the master project to any future project.
This is only necessary because Dorico does not yet give us the ability to manage them in their own separate files and then import them directly as a set.
Those of you who have used Library Manager successfully, should I expect this approach to work?
The library manager I think is intended for import and not export. When you export a library you export everything en masse including some of the defaults.
Xsample provides some custom playing techniques via libraries that they seem to have exported using this feature, but since they include the built-ins too, when I’ve tried to import them I’ve sometimes gotten craziness like duplicates of the factory ones, making a mess in Dorico.
It is only in Art Conductor that I’ve seen “limited” libraries that include just the things necessary for the custom playing and playback techniques that are being added without including anything else like the factory ones. This works extremely well with no risk of making a mess of things like the Xsample approach does. Doing this sort of thing manually might require editing the XML by hand, unless Steinberg introduces a way to make it possible to selectively export specific items like specific playing techniques to a library.
As of Dorico 6, I believe the export expression map feature is finally supposed to include custom playback techniques defined in the map, which is a welcome improvement over the old behaviour since then you can import maps without them being broken. This doesn’t help yet with custom playing techniques unfortunately.
I’ve notice during my initial efforts today that indeed pt.user entries with lower case PBT’s appear, seemingly as placeholders. They even hold their switching data.
What i’m not sure of yet is what these mean and how they function. It would seem to me the only redress is to go ahead and create PT’s and PBT’s to make them work. I’ve also noticed that once I create a user PBT I can edit the EM entry to update to my user technique.
One other thing I’m noticing is that EM entries seem to finally be showing in the entered order for combinations. Instead of getting Agile + Portato, with the result that it doesn’t show next to Portato, if I enter them in the right order I now get Portato + Agile. This is extremely welcome if it is consistent. With long EM’s it becomes a real problem to double-check if you’ve entered all the articulations and their combos.