Possible Glitch with Rests and Cues?

[Joshua_Towers]

I was working on adding cues to a piece I’ve been working on. I had previously made a mistake by deleting the rests manually when there was a cue. I later realized that you can change that in the Notation Options menu for rests (and also that deleting rests in parts also deletes them in the full score). So I went in and turned off “Starts voice” and “Ends voice” in each of the places that I had deleted the rests.

Then, I went back to adding cues, this time to my bassoon part, but I saw in the first cue of the part a single rest under one measure. All the other rests had become hidden (they were supposed to because I configured the settings to omit the bar rests when a cue is shown), but there was still one that was left. I couldn’t figure out what the issue was so I tried to disable and re-enable the omit bar rests settings, but that did not do anything. So then, I tried to delete the rest which worked, but when I tried to replace the rest I noticed that some of the rests surrounding the one I deleted were now appearing in the part cue as well.

I soon realized that for some reason there are two types of rests: The normal kind (which are called “Rest (Up-stem Voice 1)” in the selection summary) and the glitched kind (which are called “Bar Rest” in the selection summary). These “bar rests” are created when you change the properties of any of the rests. The normal rests seem to contain unnecessary options in the properties menu because they include beaming properties and the ability to affect offset the playback along. Both of which are extraneous because these things do not apply to rests. So, when you make any changes to the properties, the rest is then changed to a “bar rest” which contains none of those. Whenever someone removes a rest, then, the surrounding rests become bar rests because their start and end voice properties are changed.

This glitch seems to be two-fold. One is the fact that these bar rests are still visible in cues despite the settings demanding otherwise and the other is the fact that regular rests become bar rests when their properties are changed. There are some things I have been able to notice about these.

1. The easiest way to get rid of them is to just select them and click delete, which does not seem liked it would do anything, but the selection summary makes it clear.
2. You can copy and paste these rests and regular rests can be pasted into these rests.
3. The glitch where changing the properties of a rest turns it into a bar rest only happens with rests that take up the full measure (shocker haha)
4. Bar rests are able to change duration and to lock duration, but if you try to do as such it changes the bar rest into a regular rest.
5. You can, however, create a triplet from the bar rest and it will split the whole bar. If you delete the triplet, the bar will stay as it is even though it is only rests. In order to make the bar all one rest, you have to find a rest that has the rest button toggled on and delete it.

Attached are some images comparing the two types of rests.

[dspreadbury]

Your observations are correct, and although I can appreciate that this behaviour may not be helpful for you in this specific circumstance, this is all working as intended.

As you probably know, rests in Dorico are not normally “real” items. Whether they are bar rests or rests for specific rhythmic durations, they are implicit, i.e. Dorico creates them automatically to fill in the gaps between the notes, but they are not real items that you can interact with. When you need to change something about a rest, e.g. its duration, or its vertical position in the staff, then Dorico creates a real item at that point, and the rest (or bar rest) becomes explicit. At that point, the rest will show additional properties in the panel, as you’ve seen.

Likewise, as you say, an explicit rest can be deleted – which does not remove or hide the rest: it simply tells Dorico that it should go back to showing one or more implicit rests (or an implicit bar rest) in that location.