Possible problems in recycling a project

I just started a small project (3 players, 22 bars) Being lazy I started from an existing one which had 4 players. There was a Galoubet (a kind of flute) I kept a recorder which I dropped, a Violin I transformed into a viola, a Marimba I transformed into a Cello, That’s what I meant by recycling. I deleted all music, breaks, and annotations, I changed the Time Signature and the Key, and the project info, and reduced the number of bars.

I started to entre 8 bars of music, and decided I wanted to hear how it sounded. Again being lazy, I had full entered the 8 bars fs dessus (the Galoubet ) and Basse (the Cello), but only the 4 first bars of the alto. Here is the project at this stage:
MusetteAlcina.dorico (1.9 MB)
The playback was good, but starting from bar 7, I heard extra music that should note have been here. I started that some music must have stuck form the original Violin Player into the transformed Alto, but I was unable to see anything. I heard that using the system track to select some bars could reveal a lot of things, but it did not. But when I switched to Galley View, obviously the bar 7 and 8 were extended like they “knew” that the Alto part contained some music material albeit invisible.
And more conclusive, the Playview showed something visible:

in the bar 7 8 9 of the Alto track small bits of notes can be seen.
But where do they reside? Where can they be reached, to be erased? is there an item in the many menus that can help? I tried the Key Editor in Play View, but I saw no help there.And also I have no idea of what I did wrong when I supposedly deleted the old music. Did I delete the music and the player in the wrong order?

Thankd for helpig.

In Write mode:
Click on the first note in the Alto staff and then right-click.
In the drop-down menu which appears, choose Staff > Add Staff Below.
The “phantom” notes will now be visible and you can delete them (or do whatever you want to do with them).

Great! Efficient! They look like ornaments implementation. Is it possible that I deleted notes with some ornaments escaping deletion, and that it was what created the problem.?Thanks a lot.

Yes. If you remove a staff that has notes, Dorico keeps those notes!

It is a useful feature, particularly for notating ornaments for playback. But you do need to remember you created it!

Here I think that what happened was that I botched my selection and some “+” type ornaments might have stayed while the notes went away. You should pay attention to everything, and, indeed, remember every such thing :slight_smile: