In a piece I’m composing, several instruments should play notes in the last measure of one flow that continue into the next flow.
For example, a cymbal crash in the last measure of Flow #1 would need to continue ringing while the first notes of Flow #2 are playing. A bass note in the last measure of Flow #1 would be tied to notes in the first measure of Flow #2 so that final tonality of Flow #1, established by the bass, extends into the second flow without requiring additional bass notes in Flow #2.
Is this possible with Dorico?
The only workarounds I can think of would be to merge the two flows into a single flow; or to move the first few measures of Flow #2 to the end of Flow #1 – both which defeat the purpose of structuring this lengthy piece into flows in the first place.
And if one wanted to join the two flows–and if one had a DAW such as Cubase–it would likely be just as easy (and perhaps more flexible) to combine the flows to overlap in Cubase as to meld them in Dorico.
Thanks, Pianoleo, but I’m mostly interested in MIDI playback at this point.
Maybe the easiest thing would be to not fight City Hall & just shift the boundary between the two flows. This may fall under the category of “not cooperating with how Dorico wants to work.”
I guess it’s all moot now. I tried playing back a piece with multiple flows last night and found that Dorico introduces a pause of a few seconds when moving to a new flow. Not sure why anybody would find that useful, but unless there’s a setting for continuous playback when traversing flows, I’ll probably just combine everything in my piece into a single flow.
Library > Playback Options > Timing > Flows > Gap between flows during playback:
At least in the classical world, it’s quite usual to leave a few seconds between the movements of a symphony/sonata/oratorio etc.
Presumably this setting is set to 5 seconds by default to emulate that.
Come to think of it, 2 seconds was a sort of unwritten standard gap between tracks on CDs (though it absolutely does vary from disc to disc). I seem to remember struggling to get iTunes to release an album with gapless or varying gaps, about a decade ago…
Wait, late-breaking news: After searching this morning for related forum entries, I found one that mentiones a “Playback Options > Timing > Flows > Gap Between Flows” setting. I’m now trying to figure out where to find that setting. If it still exists in 4.1, apparently the default is to pause between flows.
Got it – Ctrl-Shift-P on a Windows PC. Of course, why didn’t I think of that?
Anyway, the default was set to 5 seconds pause between flows. Reset it to 0 and I’m now at least back to Square One.
Really, it seems like the easiest thing may be to adjust the boundary between flows to be between two measures that are not linked by ties.
FWIW, I’m using flows for a purpose a little different than what Dorico apparently intended, pianoleo. Different secions of this piece have different instruments, players, etc. I understand that Dorico has workarounds for allowing such changes, but it looks a lot easier to simply split the piece into different flows than to, for example, define a multi-instrument player, work in Galley view with a distinct staff for every instrument, but not be able to edit that player in Page View, etc. Simply setting up a separate flow for each grouping seems a lot simpler and does not force workarounds that reduce functionality. So that’s a big part of the reason why I’m splitting the piece into flows. There are separate “movements” that make sense to distinguish on the page as separate entities, but I’m hoping to use the flows feature for more than that.
Hope that helps better explain what I’m trying to do.
Oh boy, red-faced! I guess I’m getting flustered. I read right past that line in your previous message. Even when I scrolled up to look again, I missed it the first couple of times through the thread. Where’s that coffee??