I’m having problems with importing an xml file for Nielsen’s Wind Quintet scored for flute, oboe, clarinet in A, French horn in F, and bassoon.
Flute, oboe, and bassoon parts are fine.
Clarinet pitches are correct, but they are often displayed as double and triple flats throughout the piece.
French horn is incorrectly transposed.
I generated the xml in PlayScore 2 and imported it into both Dorico Pro 5 and MuseScore 4. See screencaps below.
What I initially thought was an OMR problem with PlayScore 2 may be an issue with Dorico xml import, or at least my understanding of Dorico instrument settings for French Horn (there are 19 choices!) and Clarinet in A.
There are a couple of issues here. One is that the MusicXML file unexpectedly does not fully describe the transpositions of the instruments (this is normally done by specifying both the number of chromatic steps and the number of diatonic steps by which the instrument transposes; this file only specifies the number of chromatic steps, which Dorico doesn’t handle well at present), and the other is that in the current version, Dorico is not correctly looking at all of the attributes elements in a measure to find this transposition information.
We will work on handling both of these situations more gracefully in future versions. For now, here is a version of the Dorico project where the clarinet and horn transpositions are fixed up.
Thank you very much. May I asked how you fixed it? Is your method available to an average user like myself? If not, what do you suggest for the most efficient manual adjustments so that I can complete the movements in this piece?
I made changes both to the MusicXML file itself and to the project after importing it. If you have MusicXML files of the other movements, you could zip them up and attach them here, and I could try to fix them up and import them for you.
Amazing. Thank you so much. I have also been in contact with support from Playscore 2, my current OMR app of choice. Might there be a “meeting of the minds” between your two companies on optimal xml importing?
PlayScore isn’t doing anything especially wrong in this instance: most applications export both chromatic and diatonic transposition information when defining instruments in MusicXML, which is what Dorico currently expects, but it is valid to only specify the chromatic transposition. That’s what PlayScore does, and Dorico should handle it better than it does at present. We will improve Dorico in future such that it can handle this more gracefully. If the PlayScore team also want to additionally specify the diatonic interval as well as the chromatic interval for transposition, so much the better.
