I’m having an issue all over the place with a chamber music score where MIDI playback and note length is not what I expect. Its usually long notes that playback really short which makes it difficult to hear if chords are working with melodic lines.
I highlight my brass parts for example and hit P to play and the first notes are all really short, then in the next measure things playback as expected.
in certain parts, some long notes just never play back for their full duration and I can’t figure out why.
I also should note that its inconsistent. sometimes the problem notes occasionally will work, then stop. Whether I play in, manually notate, or copy and paste from correctly working notes elsewhere in the score doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Maybe something obvious, but this is my first major project in Dorico so forgive me if thats the case! Have searched the forums, Reddit, etc, and its driving me nuts that I can’t figure this out.
first two tied whole notes don’t play back as I would expect, next few do, then there’s a half note in the whole section that sounds truncated for the whole section, then its back to what I would expect to hear.
can’t seem to find anything in the play menu that influences it. Preformatted text
What Does change things
I copied the section from the video into a completely new project file using the same project template to share here—now playback note lengths are correct.
Are you running the most recent update, Emilio? We fixed a problem in Dorico 5.1.40 that could result in inconsistent choice of articulation during playback in some circumstances.
Hopefully by now your “trust level” has advanced to the point that you can attach a project here that demonstrates the problem. Please cut down the project to the smallest chunk that still reproduces the issue, and post it here together with some instructions for how to trigger the problem, and we’ll take a look.
You might find this post helpful when it comes to cutting down your project:
A dorico file is attached where the issue is present in the brass parts. The first two half notes in the brass don’t play back with the correct articulation as well as the first tied F# in horn 1. The next few behave as expected, then the half notes on the 3rd beat of measure 4 are played with a short articulation.
Hopefully you can reproduce the issue on your end and thank you in advance for the assistance!
This took a while to pin down, but eventually I got there! If you select the cello instrument and open the Key Editor, then look in the MIDI CC editor, you’ll see that the cello has automation data for MIDI CC 123. This controller produces an “all notes off” message. There’s an automation data point in bar 2 of the music that is causing HALion to stop the sounding notes at that point.
I’m not sure why HALion is responding to this message on some channels and not others, but that’s above my pay grade! However, I’m pretty sure that you don’t really want to be creating “all notes off” messages via the Key Editor anyway, so if you delete the points in the MIDI CC editor in the cello instrument, you should be OK thereafter.