To get started in Dorico, I imported a project from Finale that had been started from the score of a previous piece, as it had the instruments I wanted. By the time I imported it, I had already cleared it of notes and their attachments and started the new arrangement, but it still had the old title and composer.
Oddity 1: In Finale, the fourth stave is labelled “Clarinets 1 and 2 in Bb”. The XML file that it generated contains
Clarinets 1 & 2 in Bb
Clarinets
1 & 2 in B
In Dorico Setup, the list on the left of the frame has “Clarinets 1 & 2 in Bb”. However, in page view, the score has
“Clarinets 1 & in Bb 2” with the lower case “b” a flat sign.
Oddity 2: Because I had left the old title and composer in, the score showed them in page view as “Make Believe” by “J Kern”. I eventually got round to changing these to “Menuetto” by “Haydn”, IIRC in Engrave mode. I found that these changes were not applied to the parts, so deduced that they had to be applied in Layout mode. In this mode, I found a window with “Make Believe” squashed into the top left-hand corner, which I changed. I have since discovered that this is a Flow name, which makes the documentation rather more understandable. From another thread on this forum I expected there to be a corresponding window for composer/arranger etc. but have not yet found how to change it in Setup. All this is probably just my problem with the documentation, but the oddity is that this particular item can be changed in Engrave in such a way as to make score and parts disagree. It would be good if the full documentation (to which we are all looking forward) had some guidance on items that are guaranteed to be the same in score and parts and items that are allowed to differ (e.g. V.S.) for good reasons.
If I may be so bold, and I promise I don’t mean to offend, but it seems much more trouble than it’s worth to open up a second program, open a file, delete all the notes, export XML, open Dorico, import XML (that is now going to introduce bugs/oddities introduced by the other program) and then edit that file in Dorico. You very easily could have created a new score from scratch and just added a few instruments.
If I had been starting from scratch, I would probably agree, although I suspect that the move from Finale, which I have been using for over 20 years, is more of a change than that from Sibelius. However, I had already keyed in about half the movement before I got Dorico and didn’t want to waste that effort; also the Setup phase would not have been negligible.
I expect importing Finale-generated pieces to remain a feature of my work, initially because the lack of documentation makes my learning of Dorico very slow and in the long term because we have many arrangements for previous incarnations of the orchestra which we shall adapt to the members who happen to be in it in the term in which we reuse them.
Have you checked the project and flow info panels? I’m sure they have cached the composer name and title. If you edit them there, then the text tokens should update appropriately. Cant help with the part-names bug, however.
I haven’t done that knowingly, because I’m not sure what these are. Your first reply solved my presenting problem and showed me the other text tokens. I changed which now diplays correctly. I also changed but have not yet made that display. I recall reading another thread from which I expect to learn how to put under the composer display when I get to Engrave mode.
I reported the part-name oddity with evidence that I think suggests that it may be a Dorico coding problem, not a Finale one, because the XML looks OK. There is no hurry for this project: it’s not likely get into the programme for next term (September).
I’m away from Dorico right now but I believe from any mode you can go to File-Project Info; this panel allows you to select the project or individual flows and type in all the relevant data that maps to the text tokens.
As far as I know, Dorico has it’s own naming conventions. Why not just rename the staves to what you want? It would only take a few seconds. (I realize, however, that you’re curious as to why the xml import didn’t work seamlessly.)
