Requests: attach audio file to flow without video & export audio for selected bars only

[violindude51]

Hi all, have recently been working on string arrangements for a couple songwriter projects and it’s brought to light a feature I have been hoping to see in a Dorico update for some time now.

Any idea if the ability to attach an audio file to a flow WITHOUT video is in the works? I realize the workaround of rendering a video with a black background is a viable solution, but it’s really annoying and time-consuming to have to do for an entire album’s worth of songs one by one.

Would also love to be able to select a specific range/section for audio file export the way one can when bouncing out of a DAW.
Example: the client wants to hear a sample of the string parts over their song but they don’t enter until the second chorus, and I don’t want to have to send them a file and say “start playback around 1:41.” Currently to accomplish this I have to export audio, then re-open the file in another DAW and trim down to start at the entrance of the strings. It would save a lot of time to be able to simply set a range of bars to export in Dorico and have the file print that way on the first bounce.

Have really been loving the feature updates in versions 5 & 6, this is just one that I always hope to see but for whatever reason never seems to come along… hoping there might be other users like me that could help get this to the attention of the folks up top!

[Christian_R]

Hi @violindude51, and welcome back.

If you search the forum for audio import #Dorico , you will find many posts discussing this.

Here the most recent I found (with some background explanation):

Importing audio into Dorico

Welcome to the forum, @Larry_Nelson1. Rest assured that we know this is a feature wanted by many users. We need to work on it in concert with our counterparts in the Cubase team, because we need more features from Cubase pulled out into our shared audio engine. Hopefully we will be able to agree on a timeline to work on this in the relatively near future, but I cannot promise that it will be worked on imminently.

[asherber]

@violindude51

but it’s really annoying and time-consuming to have to do for an entire album’s worth of songs one by one.

I don’t use audio tracks in my work, but this is the sort of thing that should be fairly simple to script.

If you’re on Windows, here’s a Powershell script that uses ffmpeg to convert one or many MP3s to MP4s. If you’ve got a folder full of MP3s, you can do ls *.mp3 | ConvertTo-Mp4 and do them all in one go; it takes a few seconds on my machine. Or you can do ConvertTo-Mp4 MySingle.mp3 to convert just one. (This assumes you’ve got ffmpeg and the script on your path.)

ConvertTo-Mp4.zip (666 Bytes)

I don’t know what the equivalent on Mac is, but there must be someone here who can help.