I have a 5-part vocal score (on 5 staves) that I created in Dorico, but when I try to export it as MIDI, it all gets lumped into a single track, rather than one track per voice. This was rather unexpected, as I figured each player would get its own track, as seems common practice from past experience.
Is there any way to encourage Dorico to export a multi-track MIDI file with each voice in its own track? (I have tools that process MIDI files and rely on each voice being a separate track.)
When I export MIDI, each instrument gets its own track.
By any chance do you have all five vocal voices played by the same instrument sound?
From some rudimentary experimentation, it appears that Dorico combines all vocal tracks for soprano/alto/tenor (basically treble and treble-8 clefs) into one track, and all the vocal tracks for bass (bass clef) into another track. Maybe if I assign them to different instruments it will output differently? Seems like an ugly kludge.
Are you piping them to the same VST on the same MIDI channel?
If these are 5 separate Instruments then they should be exported to separate MIDI tracks. I suspect that you only have one instrument with 5 staves, which will output to the same MIDI track.
In the particular example I’m looking at, it’s 5 singer instruments: Soprano 1, Soprano 2, Alto, Tenor, Bass.
I end up with 2 tracks, the first is called “Soprano 1” and contains the first 4 voices. The second track contains just Bass. It’s very odd.
Can you post an image of your HALion screen so we can see the sounds assigned?
For example
Well, I’m not using HALion for playback, but looking at the playback screen I noticed that the mysterious popup of numbers 1-16 under each voice were all set to 1 for the top 4 voices, and set to 2 for the bass. Sure enough, fixing each one to have a separate number caused the MIDI to get exported with separate tracks for each voice, as desired:
I must admit the various controls and popups in the Play tab are pretty opaque. Will have to see if I can find more documentation to help me understand, since I did not connect that they would impact the way the MIDI file is exported.
