Tempo automation not restoring tempo after rit.

Dorico
#1

I like the tempo automation tool. I’ve been using it to nuance the rit at the end of a piece.

But when I try to use it for ritards and fermatas in the middle of the piece, I’m running into difficulty. If I use the pencil tool, even when I returned the tempo to its original marking, I’m consistently getting playback at half speed. What’s marked as 68 is playing back at 34 (or something like that), even though the graphical representation should return it to “a tempo.” Moreover, the remainder of the piece plays at half tempo, accels and rits and all.

And the meter hasn’t changed, it’s 6/8 throughout.

Also, I notice that when I click to add a node (so I can draw in a ritard and then restore original tempo), it’s impossible to do so without changing the tempo going forward. It nudges it down every time.

Thoughts? Something I’m doing wrong? Feels like this feature is still a little bit under construction.
tempo automation.png

#2

Can you attach a simple project that demonstrates this problem in action, Dan? E.g. cut all but the last 20 bars and delete all but the top instrument (or whatever is the minimal case that reproduces the problem), and then attach that here.

#3

Daniel, the file is here. You can see where I drew in some automation starting at bar 93. Any change causes a rapid slow-down, including using the line tool.

Posting the whole thing because it’s easier for me, but if you prefer a stripped-down version, I can provide that too. Thanks!
When You Were Born - Copy.dorico.zip (616 KB)

#4

Sorry for the delay in coming back to you on this one, Dan. This ended up occupying me pretty much all day today!

It turns out that when you add an ‘a tempo’, if you have some tempo automation data points in the Timing track in Play mode, Dorico will use the last of those automation points as the restorative tempo, which is obviously not very smart. So Paul and I have been working on this today and in the next update we will make it such that automation tempo events will be ignored when figuring out what the restorative tempo should be.

While I was troubleshooting, I found myself wanting to know what the actual tempo was, so we’ve also added a read-out of the current tempo to the mini transport in the toolbar and to the Transport window, which I hope others will also find useful.

#5

Great! Thanks for your hard work on that.