I have a strange problem with percussion players: Whenever there is some re-sorting of players, they end up right at the top, after piccolo and before flutes.
The file stems from an XML import, but I have also tried to create new - empty - players and move the instruments to them, with no improvement. The instruments are percussion kits that I can edit normally.
Anything else I can do to convince Dorico that these percussion players should be placed under the timpani line?
P.S.: An “xml-import” tag would be a very nice addition here on the forums
(Just to clarify: I absolutely love the auto-sorting feature and don’t want to turn it off. I’m just baffled why they constantly end up in the wrong spot.)
Yes, I wonder whether for some reason those percussion instruments started life (during the import process) as flutes? You could try using the Change Instrument feature to change them to the closest available real percussion instrument.
I can’t “Change instrument”, as the menu entry is greyed out. These instruments have (correctly) been imported as percussion kits. (One thing though: they are the only players that are Group Players, while all the other instruments are Solo Players.)
I’ve tried creating new players with new percussion instruments, but it takes some time as I have to find the correct instruments within the kits so copy&paste can work correctly.
There seems to be some missing information (although I can’t say if it’s missing in Finale’s export in the first place ot not being imported correctly by Dorico) regarding the question “What instruments does a percussion kit consist of?” One of these percussion staves in Final had only a tam-tam and a triangle, but in Dorico it ended up as a regular full drum set (and neither a tam tam nor a triangle).
I will have to create new players with their respective instruments they need to hold
One more thing that I observed in this specific file:
Normally, when you add a new player and select “Drum set” as instrument, in the middle column you find the options “Drum set (simple)” and “Drum set (full)”(*), and when you select “Drum set (full)” then in the third column there are no further options.
In this specific file though, when I add a new player and select “Drum set (full)”, the third column shows “Standard”, “1”, “2”, and “3”. I guess this is because the file has 3 percussion players that have been imported as some kind of drum set kit?
(*) or somthing along these lines; I use Dorico in German
Well, the next step:
I create an empty percussion player and add the same instruments that one of the incorrectly sorted players has, making sure that they are on the same positions.
I copy and paste.
But only some notes show up. All of one instrument’s notes are missing, although they are both “Base drum (very low)” and on the same position.
I’m giving up. This percussions-imported-from-xml is a mess that I can not resolve by myself. There must be something going on behind the scenes that I have no insight into. I will have to re-enter those lines from scratch.
One last thing I did, regarding the “maybe it was a flute initially” idea:
When I export the percussion kit from a player that is being sorted incorrectly, and create a new player by importing the percussion kit file that I just exportet, the new player gets sorted incorrectly too.
So I guess the information to sort the player is somehow included in the percussion kit data?
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more, and I suspect that in fact a custom percussion kit will never be sorted particularly intelligently, because Dorico doesn’t look inside the percussion kit to see which instruments are actually in the kit. If it’s a custom kit you’ve created yourself from scratch, then I would expect it to be sorted to the end of the player list, but if it’s a custom kit created by e.g. MusicXML import then I’m not sure what exactly it will do, and I’d need to look at the project itself to really tell you precisely what’s happening. I daresay there is some room for further improvement in this regard.
I think that for now I will just deactivate staff sorting in these files.
One thing I am really afraid of by now is that these xml-imported files might yield more abnormalities down the road, and in some years I might not even know if they had been created via an xml import.
