Playback offsets interfering with other editing actions

I am editing a project imported from MIDI with its note positions preserved (because I worked hard to get the humanization I wanted before importing).
Now I have run across an issue involving them. The notes in the first measure are a painful edit to get an even sextuplet which I will convert to a set of grace notes. The notes at the beginning of the next measure have what I guess is a fairly large offset:


The problem is that attempting to change the duration of the notes in the second measure to fill the bar results in this:

I cannot nudge the notes left because the offset is less than the minimum grid value (so they overshoot). Is there any elegant way to shrink these offsets rather than hand-typing some new, smaller set of values? How small will they need to be to stop disrupting Dorico’s interpretation of where they begin?

Hi @dascott, can you upload a Dorico file with just these couple of bars, to seeing what is the situation and experimenting?

I will - but how do I do that for just a few bars?

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See here:

Got
Problem.dorico.zip (466.3 KB)
it:

Thank you for the file, @dascott . I am not sure what you were after, as, in that fast tempo the fine adjustments that you made don’t seem to be perceivable anyway.

There are, instead, some removed rests that cause the rhythmic problem (and you probably had forgotten that there was those hidden rests and tried to compensate the playback position with playback overrides).

Here below a short video. Also, if you will put the fast notes as grace notes, Dorico handles them automatically, just put the grace notes before the barline (in the properties panel). If you want to ged rid of the playback offsets, select all the notes, and in Play menu choose Reset Playback Overrides:

Thank you, that is very helpful - but I am totally confused by what had been hidden by Dorico until you revealed it. Why did it not show me all those rests? At no point did I ever add any rests - this was all part of what Dorico did when it imported my MIDI data. How can I change the settings so nothing like that is hidden from me?

As I had mentioned in my original query, I dont want to lose the humanization I imported, so setting those offsets all to zero is not ideal for me.

Which software did you use for exporting the MIDI from? Can you provide the midi file?

The MIDI file was exported from Logic Pro, which I used to do the initial editing of the data. I can tell you that there are many notes which will generate offsets like that, but the file is 800 measures long and I don’t really want to generate a sub-snippet right now. Also it is an original composition so I prefer not to send it out whole.

I would suggest to start from a clean situation, and then use the played durations function in Dorico to reconstruct the humanisation (I am struggling to understand what kind of humanisation differences would be perceivable by 64th EDIT: 32nd notes in a quarter=156 tempo situation, thought)

You could just create a copy, and delete everything else, and leave just this two bars in their original position. I could open it in my Logic, and import in Dorico and see what is happening and give you further advice.

1/64 beat would actually be quite sloppy as humanization, even at this tempo. Notes of that duration are there for me as markers: I wanted to have those 64th notes visible so I could convert them into grace notes (quantized at 1/32, I could not tell which ones should be grace notes and which should be left as-is). So I had to preserve all the offsets for humanization, which had the added effect of leaving these small rests, etc.

You do know that you should apply the quantization permanently in Logic before exporting I guess?

Jesper

I know about this, but had never set this when importing into earlier projects. 95% of what got imported into Dorico looks great - there are only a small number of places where the offsets interfere in the way I describe in this post.

Problem.zip (1.1 MB)
For obscure reasons, selecting “all” over a large region does not select the controller data as well, so all those notes are gone except the measures in question, but not the controllers (I use the controllers as special markers in Logic). One important thing: I had already done extensive editing of the imported data to get that 6-note grace pattern in Dorico. You’ll get to see just how bad it looks in the original import. And yes, these were all supposed to tie over to the next bar - but how do you do that without Dorico adding each new sustained note to each stem in the grace note as each one ties across?

Could you explain a bit the “filter” commands you were using to get the rests to display, and why they were not visible by default?

Select all, filter for notes, Untick starts and ends voice properties in the lower panel.

Jesper

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ProblemAlt.dorico (470.3 KB)

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OMG this is confusing! So I have gotten to this point where my notes are all tied across and I have “exposed” the hidden “starts with” and “ends with” rests:


Now I use alt-shift-R to remove those pesky rests, but if I go back and select the notes again, “Ends voice” shows as activated again, and if I deactivate it, the rests are all right back where they were.

Hi @dascott, I looked at your logic file.

Again I think the fastest way is what I suggested above and @Derrek realised in his example (grace notes). I continue not to understand what humanisation are you looking for: that are very very fast notes that are hold with the pedal and occur just before the first beat of the new bar. Grace notes functionality handles this automatically in Dorico. And you can tweak the played durations in key editor/Played durations.

Sorry that I cannot help further, as for me your workflow is based on a level of detailed positioning that I cannot quite understand (due to the fastness of the passage).

If you need the audio exactly as you played it, I suggest you export the audio from Logic, and then use Dorico to notate those passages in a simple and straightforward way, and provide the player with he audio.

I think every human player (not being a computer) would have great difficulties anyway to play exactly as your intended “humanisation” requires, so why not leave a little interpretatory freedom to the human player (providing him with the audio from logic as a guideline for you intentions and a readable score)?

Here anyway some information about removing rests, and their general behaviour: