I have just found that if I have a long cresc. that commences from niente, and the hairpin has that atribute turned on, the voice is muted in NotePerformer. Removing the niente and using a plain hairpin, the voice can be heard as expected.
Has anybody else seen this? Is it a NP bug, or some incorrect usage ion my part?
Do you have an absolute dynamic at the end of the hairpin? If you only write a hairpin from niente but without specifying another dynamic at the end of the hairpin, you’ll only get a very small crescendo from (effectively) pppppp to ppppp.
Now that is interesting. Thanks for the clue. In fact these niente cresc. end in fz. if I change that to an absolute dynamic, it does work. I suppose it could be said that fz is not an absolute dynamic but an accent, which is technically correct of course. But the composer I engrave for uses it to mean forte with a strong accent, which is understandable by players in general.
This is an interesting point. I can just use f or ff and it solves the NotePerformer problem (well I suppose it is not even a problem!) even if somewat unexpected behaviour (to me, at least).
This is not quite the whole story. Using an absolute dynamic works, but not on the viola in my string quartet. Changing to a violin in the NotePerformer mixer makes no difference. I will make a small example project to demonstrate.