Extremely frustrated Finale refugee here, struggling mightily to do the most basic things in Dorico. This is my first of likely many posts in the coming weeks as I try to erase 25 years of habits and knowledge from my old dog brain.
Here goes:
Like many out here, I’ve got hundreds of Finale documents I will be converting to MusicXML for importing in to Dorico. I tried just one this morning, and right off the bat ran into an issue I could not find an answer for. The piece is in a simple 6/8 with a pick-up, and the import both doesn’t show the time signature and clearly hasn’t grouped the notes into 6/8. It seems to have treated 8th notes as quarter notes. I’ve spent an hour here trying to just make the time signature visible, to now avail. Here’s a screenshot of what I’m seeing:
I understand how to change the time signature from the forums, but that doesn’t help if I can’t even see it. Any help would be appreciated. I’m not even past the first bar of the first piece I’m trying to convert, so I’m feeling quite daunted by this task.
If you want to use the mouse (as it appears from the screenshot with the time signatures panel open), click on the time signature first and then click in the location in the score where you want to place it.
You can also use the time signatures popover. Select an object at the location you want to add the time signature (like the “C major” signpost at the beginning of the line) and press Shift-M (for meter/time signature) and then enter your time signature. If you want a pick up bar of half a beat (as it appears from your screen shot), type in the pop-over: 6/8, .5
If there is another issue, it might be helpful to post a version of the file to see what else might be going on.
Welcome to the forum, Pete! We certainly can help smooth your bumpy transition.
There do appear to be a lot of issues in that screenshot. You have two pickup bars both numbered 0, an incomplete bar 5, clefs and metronome note not showing, l.v. ties on notes that look like they should be regular ties – for that matter, notes copied into vocal staves that should be cues.
If you haven’t been through the First Steps Guide, it is highly recommended. Trying to get your Finale files into Dorico as the first project is too many things to take on at once. If this is a fairly simple, short piece, it would be a good thing to recopy from scratch in Dorico, to start to learn your way around.
In particular, Dorico handles bars and meters totally differently from Finale. You won’t be able to massage a score into place by messing with explicit barlines. Perhaps post the XML file you imported here (as soon as you are able).
Put another way: learning your way around Dorico first is like learning to ride a bicycle, while learning Dorico by trying to grapple with Finale/XML export/import is like learning to operate a nuclear submarine.
I have done quite much xml imports from Finale myself, being a former Finale user. In my experience many of the problems in the conversion comes from Finale’s way of doing certain things that Dorico interprets in a rather unforgiving way so to speak (IMHO).
One thing that you could try is to export a section of your piece, for instance from bar 2 to the end. If the problem comes from the pickup bar, maybe you will get around it in that way.
Another thing you can try is to import your xml file into Musescore (free program), export xml from Musescore, and then import into Dorico. Sometime this does the trick, as Musescore interprets and exports xml data in a different way.
The cause of this is that MusicXML describes the appearance of the page, relative to the starts of measures, while Dorico is trying hard to interpret everything in terms of functions and meaning. And this is assuming Finale users created things using the right tools in the first place, which is too often not the case.
Thanks Mark, that is better explained.
Yes, especially Finale style workarounds with independent time signatures turned out to be a major problem in one project I did. Had to do that one in chunks, and reinput many sections that were simply unimportable.
Thanks all, I really appreciate the compassion and patience here. This is a bumpy ride for sure, but it seems like there will be some solid help along the way. Thank you, it means a lot, especially for those of us FinRefs who have been using Finale every day for years as a key tool in our creative lives.
So this isn’t my first Dorico attempt, I started with a few lead sheets to get my feet wet. That was slow, but I got there in the end and learned a bunch. And to be honest the end result looks far sharper than the lead sheets I’ve been doing in Finale for decades. So that is encouraging, to say the least.
As for this piece, I shifted over to the importing to try that out, as I’ve got a few hundred scores. Curiously, there were a whole bunch of other problems with my MusicXML file, including - as you can see in my screen shot - the Common Time Signatures window was blank, so I couldn’t pick one there. I’d already figured out how to do this with popovers, but that wasn’t working either. So after reading through here I did the ol’ delete and re-import, and now all the things that were driving me nuts this morning seem sorted - the time signature is there, the pick-up is working, and I can see all the options in the Time Signature window. Strange. So now I’m looking at kind of what I have been expecting - the kind of wonky formatting one finds in any kind of conversion. I’ll poke away at this and see what comes up, but for now “turning it off and turning it back on” seemed to do it.
Thanks again everyone, it feels good to know there are fellow travellers out there. I look forward to paying it forward should I ever get the kind of handle on Dorico that I’ve taken for granted with Finale.
I have a suspicion you have been messing around with fonts, as there is no crotchet showing in your metronome mark. Could that be causing other items to ‘disappear’?
Thanks Janus, I’m not sure what happened. I’ve started from scratch with this one, will see what happens. My re-import of the piece looks a lot better for some reason, including the metronome marking, which just used the Maestro font in Finale. But as has been pointed out, there’s a lot of wonkiness in Finale that Dorico struggles with, and which I can only assume is a big reason why the program is shutting down. I’m betting it was just too heavy a lift to modernize it. Anyway, I’m learning as I go here, thanks for chiming in.
