Player holding more than 1 instrument: layout issue

The way Dorico deals with players and instruments is brilliant in principle, but I’ve come across a situation where it seems to concatenate multirests across rehearsal marks and key signature changes. I attach a short extract that illustrates the problem (instrument change problem v1). Clarinet 3 is Bb clarinet doubling bass clarinet and Dorico concatenates bars 42 to 63, rather than breaking the multirest at 43 for letter 2 and 48 for letter 3. Similarly it concatenates 128-130 ignoring the rehearsal mark, double bar and key change at 129. It’s possible to work round by inserting system breaks at bars 43/129 but that’s less than ideal and in more complex cases will take quite a bit of messing around to produce a useable result.

Unsurprisingly, if I cut and paste all the notes onto one part there is no problem. I haven’t bothered attaching this. Weirdly though, if I do this for the first bass clarinet entry only (bars 20-41), Dorico concatenates bars 97-125 and ignores the rehearsal mark etc at 117 despite there being no instrument change until after 127 (instrument change problem v3).

The music did originate from an xml import, but (I think) I’ve reset everything that possibly could be reset. I shall of course be delighted to discover this is simple operator error and to know what I did wrong.

Leaving this issue aside, I think the extract also shows how, as others have said, it would be useful (?essential) to be able to move instrument change notifications individually in engrave mode. There is often more space below the staff and/or in the bar before the new instrument plays. For example the Bb clarinet entry at bar 126 where I’d suggest it would be more convenient underneath the multirest immediately preceding the entry.

Mike
instrument change problem v3.zip (1.98 MB)
instrument change problem v1.zip (1.81 MB)

I’m sorry to say that this is a bug in Dorico 1.1, which will be fixed in the forthcoming 1.1.10 update, which we hope to have ready within the next couple of weeks, all being well.

We also agree that it is necessary to be able to adjust the positions of instrument change labels, and we do plan this for the future. It’s difficult at present because they are not “real” items: they are conjured up as needed, and as such there’s currently nowhere in the application’s data model for user overridden data for these items to live, and some complexities in working out when that data should be kept and when it should be thrown away. But we have a plan and I hope (though I cannot promise it) that it will be possible to adjust the position of these items in the next major update to the application later in the year.

Thanks Daniel. That’s good to know.

Dorico was a present to myself; my needs are very straightforward and my existing notation software could usually be forced to do what I wanted. The top-notch quality of Dorico’s engraving and the versatility of its new approach were immediately apparent, but the deciding factor for me was the responsiveness and helpfulness of you and your team on this forum. (I know I’m far from the first person to say this and that I won’t be the last either.)

I don’t know if my problem is relevant to the above, but in my second Dorico Project I managed to mess up the Flute sound and now it is a Voice sound, and I don’t know how to get it back. In my first Project, the Flute sound is fine, so I know it is there.

Dear ErnieMuse,
did you check in Play mode (cmd-4 or ctrl-4) that the sound is badly chosen ? You could go to the play menu and Apply default playback template — this should do the trick. Or click on the e next to HALion in the right panel, it opens the HALion editor, and in the new window, the left list is the list of the players with the attached sounds. You can easily change those, clicking on them and choosing in the HALion library… Hope it helps !

Thanks, it worked!