Snoring sax sound -- instruments not added to Halion properly

In the attached project file, you can hear the tenor sax has a “snoring” sound, only on the note with staccato.

I suppose this is working as designed, but it is not a very desirable outcome from what I consider a normal workflow. I added the sax in Setup, but it did not assign a VST instrument. Shouldn’t Dorico always try to set up the playback synth correctly?

As there was no instrument assigned, I went into PLAY and set the sax to a channel (4) I wasn’t using. That had previously been set up for trumpet. And it had the HSO Trumpet Solo expression map. Evidently that map’s interpretation of staccato doesn’t work with the GM sax voice I selected. When I set it to DEFAULT, that cleared up the problem.

It seems to me that ideally Dorico should set up all of this when an instrument is added. Failing that, at minimum, I’d think when you load a new program into a Halion channel, a compatible expression map should be selected automatically. I realize that may fall into the boundary between Steinberg and Dorico, but it is the sort of thing a new or occasional Dorico user will find frustrating.
Snoring sax.zip (585 KB)

Dorico does assign both instrument sounds and VST expression maps automatically when you add players and their instruments to your project. However, once you have started making changes to the assignment of instruments to endpoints in Play mode, Dorico will no longer load any more sounds automatically, because it assumes that you’re now handling all of that stuff manually. If in fact you don’t want to handle it all manually, you can choose Play > Playback Template and choose to reapply the default playback template, which will of course undo whatever manual assignments you’ve made but will also ensure that every instrument is routed to an appropriate sound and has an appropriate VST expression map set.

Makes sense.

I copied another dorico file for this project. I did not make any manual changes to instruments on this project, but I probably did on the earlier project, so I can understand why Dorico did what it did.

I wonder if it would make sense for Dorico to prompt or notify the user when it has decided not to assign an instrument. Such a pop-up could offer to reorganize the VST assignments and resume assigning for the user, and it could have a “don’t bother me with this again - I know what I’m doing” checkbox.

This area of the program will certainly be developed further as we continue to enrich what a playback template is and how you can use it to set things up to your liking more easily.