Hello. Brand new to dorico. trying to score a one woman musical, all I need are lead sheets with guitar chords and melody. Looks like everyone says using flows is the best way to organize all these songs. I’m confused on how to get all the songs into the same project/flow. I’ve already scored all 16 songs as individual songs/files. Any advice or help pointing me in the right direction?
The use of flows, or not, is entirely up to personal preference. Using flows in your situation isn’t necessarily “correct”. There are some advantages and potentially disadvantages to using flows for large projects. Like everything there’s a bit of give and take and it’s up to you decide what works best for you.
The advantages of a single project are there are many things you’ll only need to do once, rather than for each song if it’s in its own project. If using custom templates, options, etc. you can apply them to all flows at once, rather than having to set up each project separately. If you’re setting up for print, you won’t need to fiddle with page numbering.
The main potential disadvantage is Dorcio can slow down with really large projects. This is more likely with orchestral scores with many instruments and condensing turned on. I wouldn’t expect 16 lead sheets to cause any performance issues.
If you decide you want all your songs in a single project, you can import flows into projects from the File menu.
If you import files as new flows into the first project, be aware that any manual layout tweaks you have made in the imported files will be removed and reset to the spacings of the first flow. This is why it is important to get the global spacing parameters as close as possible before doing any manual layout adjustments. Plus, it will save you a ton of work/time doing all of that manually. Let Dorico do the majority of the work, so that you don’t have to. Yes, it will take some time initially to learn where all those settings are (and what they do). But in the long run, you will save time – especially as you do more projects and really learn Dorico.
Hi @kevinmcloud, and welcome to the Forum and to Dorico.
Yes flows are really amazing. You can open your first Projects, then from menu File>Import>Flows… and select all the other projects. Choose to merge the players when possible, and see what happens. If you have further questions please ask (especially for the page templates, titles, layout, etc…).
Here an old but good short video (Tuesday Tipps):
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You can import each document as a Flow into one project! (Make sure you merge the players.)
You add and manage Flows in Setup mode: choose which players are in each flow; etc.
In Layout Options you can set each Flow to follow on from the previous one, on the same page; each with its own title (Flow Heading) automatically.
It makes it effortless to create an entire musical in one document, with all the parts and scores as necessary.