Section condensing issues

Dorico
1

First off, congratulations on another great update! I’m really enjoying the new features.

I think I’m running into some issues with condensed sections. Attached is a project with music in six flows.

  1. The “div.” label appears as expected, but there’s no “unis.” label for the occasional unison note, such as the one in measure 5. I kind of expect them to be here as solo instruments would with “a 2”, except with additional “div.” labels. Is there an option for this?
  2. I put a condensing change to force double stems, but this prevents condensing entirely. I think this is because the divisi is in the middle of the system?
  3. I moved the divisi to the beginning of the system and duplicated the music to both parts. This flow is fine, but I would rather not have to do that.
  4. I decided that I want the following system to be single-stem, so I added a blank condensing change and “unis.” appears as expected. However, the appearance of the label is unstable, and sometimes it appears as “div.”, such as after toggling condensing.
  5. I moved the first note of that system to the following beat, but “div.” appears instead of “unis.”.
  6. I used Restore Unison, and the labels go away entirely, which I suppose is expected. The staff label implies unison, but since the last system was not, perhaps a label could be included here to prevent ambiguity?

Also, I should mention that when duplicating flows, condensing change settings do not get copied over, and I had to manually set them each time.
section_condensing_test.zip (589 KB)

2

Thanks for your feedback.

  1. We decided that so-called “mid shared-stem unisons”, which would typically be labeled “a 2” in a condensed solo passage, did not warrant similar labels in condensed divisi passages, because unless the music is hyper-prescriptively notated, the conductor doesn’t actually need to know or indeed care that all of the divisions have ended up unison at that point. So at the moment, no, there’s no option for this.
  2. & 3. If you specify a condensing change for divisi that requires a different configuration of staves than is active at the start of the system, yes, the condensing change will take effect at the start of the next system instead (this is just the same as for solo players, of course).
  3. If you can pin down the situation under which the label appears to change, that would help us to investigate further.
  4. If a divisi change is active at the start of the system, you will get a “div.” label.
  5. You mean right at the start of the system if it coincides with the return to unison writing?

And thanks also for the report about Duplicate Flow: that one had slipped through the cracks, and we’ll try to take care of that very soon.

3

Thanks for your response! I’ll keep your points in mind when writing for section players.

For the issue with the unstable label: I have attached a minimal project with one system. The issue occurs with the second condensing change which resets double stems to single stems. As soon as the condensing change is inserted (or when the project is loaded), “unis.” appears, but after turning condensing off and back on, “unis.” disappears. (In the previous example, “div.” appears instead because of the beginning-of-system logic you mentioned.)

For the “unis.” at the start of the system when returning to unison writing: Yes, but you have a point about how such labels are not necessarily useful.
section_condensing_test_2.zip (568 KB)

4

Thanks for this minimal case. I can confirm I see the same behaviour: we’ll look into this when we get a chance.