Player switch when importing flows

Dorico
1

I have been engraving a quite big Easter Passion Mass (9 movements, piano, choir and a dozen soloists). Due to its size, I have created all needed players, then created the different flows, and assigned the players to each flow.

After that, I saved copies of the original file and distributed them to the single engravers who needed to copy the material. This was the only way we could get to the bottom of this in time.

I now have to merge the different flows into a single score. Easy enough, File > Import > Flows, select Merge with existing players (they should be the same, after all).

What happens is that the Piano and Choir (bottom two players) are consistently correct, while the soloists are shifted, either by one or two players down. I have checked multiple times: the players are in the same order, the instruments are the same.

Has anyone had similar experiences in the past? Or could it be something in this project (if so I know what to do :slight_smile: )?

It’s not a big deal to select to end of flow and move to staff below when needed, but since time is short, I would appreciate if this didn’t happen. I took all the care of creating a single file before separating the flows at the beginning exactly to avoid this issue.

Thank you for your insight!

2

I’m guessing that even though you have renamed the individual soloists, ‘under the hood’ there are for example multiple Soprano instruments. The Merge with existing players function always starts from the top, and any soprano part will just get assigned to the first soprano that it comes across, regardless of names. I’ve had a similar issue when compiling multiple operatic excerpts into a single score, suddenly the Queen of the Night is also playing Brünnhilde and Salomé. As you’ve found, luckily the remedy is easy but it’s still an annoyance, and easy to overlook if you aren’t paying attention.
A more concrete FR could be to expand the Import Flows dialog with a list of dropdowns where you can set the source and destination (including Create New, of course) for each player individually. Alternatively: include a rule to merge only when the player names also match.

4 Likes
3

This is exactly what is happening!

Thank you for sharing your experience and for voicing the feature request so clearly.