Trouble (bug?) when extra instrument for player interacts with extra staff starting mid-system

[pcantrell]

I’m running into trouble with a piece that mixes 5- and 1-line staves in one movement, and has an extra staff that’s supposed to start & stop mid-system in a different movement.

A simple example of the problem

Here is an exciting new piano piece. The second movement has an extra staff for just one bar, which correctly appears & then disappears mid-system:

I decide I want more cowbell, so I add a new instrument to the player, and put cowbell in the first movement. But now cowbell shows up in the second movement as well — and that makes the extra staff extend across the entire system:

No problem! I tell Dorico to hide unused staves, and the cowbell disappears from the second movement. However, the extra staff still extends (incorrectly) across the whole system in the second movement (compare with the first screenshot up above):

Here are the Dorico files for the screenshots above. (1.4 MB)

The problem in context

Here’s a snippet of the actual piece that prompted this question. I added an unpitched instrument to achieve this mix of 5- and 1-line staves in one movement:

A different movement had this:

…which after adding that 1-line instrument in the other movement turned into this, which caused some layout problems and just looks wrong in context:

A near-solution that doesn’t work

In the simple example at the top, if you move the cowbell to a second player, then a layout that shows both players will correctly handle the partial staff. Hooray!

However, this break the actual piece in question, which relies on switching from a 1-line to a 5-line staff mid-system:

…which only works if the two “instruments” belong to the same player. When I move the unpitched staves to a different player, I get this:

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Is this a bug? I think maybe it’s a bug?

Can anybody spot a workaround I haven’t tried?

My current workaround is to make a PDF, delete the player’s 1-line instrument (being very careful not to save), print just the pages with the extra staff from the later movement (which now look correct), undo, and then replace those two pages in the original PDF with the new pages using a PDF editor. Hardly ideal.

[Craig_F]

How about two Piano players. One with Cowbell, one not and assign them to the different Flows. So, the movement 2 player doesn’t have cowbell.

[pcantrell]

Aha, brilliant! This did the trick. Thank you, Craig.

What I’d missed, in case it helps others:

It is not possible to give the same player different instruments across different flows. (That was the limitation I was up against in my original post trying to find a workaround for the partial staff bug.) It is, however, possible to have entirely different players in different flows. One can do this by creating all the players, then removing them from individual flows as follows:

• Go to setup mode.
• Select a flow in the bottom panel. (Important to select a single flow first!)
• Now check/uncheck different players for that flow in the left panel.

So in my score, I have now two separate players, as Craig suggested: both are named “piano,” one has only a single piano for their instrument, and one has both piano and the unpitched instrument.

I would still consider what I described in the OP as a bug, so one for the long-suffering Dorico developers’ backlog, but I think my problem is solved. Hooray!