There is no sound in Dorico 5 when using Note Performer playback for notes starting from the zero point (dal niente). The crescendo is not working either. This wasn’t a problem in Dorico 4. I’m working on an orchestral score, and it’s frustrating to see the sounds that aren’t hearable in the audio playback. This issue has forced me to revert back to the previous version. Do you have any ideas on how to solve this problem? o<f = silence…
The attached project plays back as expected for me, i.e. the first note has a default dynamic of around mf, then the whole notes play a crescendo from niente and a diminuendo back to niente, and consequently the quarter note in the following bar does not play back. Playback for me is the same both when using NotePerformer (3 on my system here, but I’m sure that doesn’t make any difference) and when using HALion Symphonic Orchestra.
niente.dorico (656.8 KB)
Thank you for the quick response. Interestingly, when playing your example, it doesn’t perform the crescendo from the niente note. It only starts the crescendo on the following note. However, it does work correctly with HALion. What could I do or change in the preferences to achieve the desired effect? Maybe it’s because of the newest version of Note Performer (4)?
P.S. Yess, but it works with Note Performer 3 version (I reinstalled previous version of NP)… However, Note Performer 4 does play crescendos correctly in Dorico 4.
In the first instance, perhaps you should contact Arne Wallander and see what he has to say about it.
Thanks for the advice and quick respond! 
I looked into this.
Fade from niente works in Dorico 4 but not in Dorico 5 because it uses a “zero velocity” for the niente note-on.
Since zero velocity is a note-off by the MIDI standard, the note-ons are registered as note-offs (note-on velocity must be clamped between 1 and 127).
Consequently, fading out works, but not fading in.
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FYI it doesn’t play as expected for me using NP4 with BBCSO, the fade in is silent as described by OP and Wallander.
Thanks, Arne. I guess we’re lucky that HALion Sonic handles this in a non-standard way, then! We’ll look into this and ensure that the start of the note doesn’t have zero velocity.
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Just to add I’m getting the same, which is a real handicap. Having to resort to Dorico 4 (with NP) for the project I’m working on.
Both ways: n<f or f>n neither working
If it’s too much work, we can find a way to hard-code NotePerformer to accept zero-velocity note-on.
I would have done so already, but I worry it may cause issues in Sibelius or Finale, or a legacy version of them. I need to investigate before making such a fundamental change in our MIDI engine.
I’m sure we’ll be able to take care of it.
Interestingly that Dorico 5 plays well from niente with NP v3 but not with NP4. This is whay I’m with Dorico 5 now but having NP3.
It still isn’t solved in NP 4.1 version.
We’ve located the problem to a conversion issue in our VST3 interface, where the dynamics is slightly lower than 1 and gets truncated to zero (rather than rounded to one) when we convert it to regular MIDI velocity. We can easily fix this on our end, and will do so for the next NotePerformer update.
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Any news on this? My work depends on using niente.
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The proble
The problem is fixed in-house, but we’re in summer mode and don’t plan any updates now.
I believe it could be worked around by going to the dynamics lane in Dorico > Play and manually adjusting the velocity/dynamic of niente so that it’s a hair higher than default
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Thanks, I’ll give it a try (again since I played with this before. However the number of times I use niente will make composition arduous).
Probably more effective for me to use D4 pro tem . Thanks for your response Arne.
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