EDIT: On closer inspection, this strange shortening only seems to have applied to the Violin 1 line.
I’ve opened up the project I’m working on and throughout the whole piece (10 minutes or so) note lengths have been altered. It definitely wasn’t like this when I saved it last night. As an example I’ve attached two screenshots of a violin line. The playback sounds very non-legato, and on inspection in Play mode, all the notes are clipped by around 15% from their correct length. (The first, selected note in this section has a blue bar which extends to the correct place, but it is obscuring the shorter orange bar, which represents its new, truncated playback).
I have tried “Reset Playback Overrides” to no avail. Weirdly, I’ve tried pasting in sections from a previous version (which has correct note lengths) and on arrival in the new file, they’re all shortened like the notes they’re replacing.
I don’t think it’s relevant but I applied “Select All, Edit > Voices > Change Voice > Upstem Voice 1” (to correct a MusicXML import problem) to the entire project some hours before closing it yesterday, but had continued working on it, and the note lengths sounded fine when I saved it. I imported the original from Sibelius months ago, and have done many hours of work on it since with no similar issue.
Any suggestions, before I revert to the older saved version?
Reset Playback Overrides applies to a selection, so - just ruling out the obvious - did you select the violin 1 staff before trying Reset Playback Overrides?
Do the individually selected notes show Playback End Offsets in the properties panel?
I wonder (though it’s really not something I know much about) if there’s a playing technique somewhere that’s telling the Violin 1 notes to shorten. Is the whole violin 1 staff affected, right from the very beginning?
In a new twist, I viewed a V1 passage from earlier on in the piece. In Play mode, the selected notes looked correct. As soon as I clicked “P” on the keyboard to play the selected passage, all the bars instantly shuffled to their new corrupted length and have remained there.
I had wondered about the playing technique thing too. I scanned the whole part looking to see if I’d got up in the night and written “sempre non-legato” on the V1 part in my sleep, but there’s nothing there.
If I select the notes and switch on “Playback End offsets” for the whole passage, and leave it set to zero, the notes revert to their correct length but ignore the slur over the 3rd-5th notes.
Yes, no modifications. Not deliberate ones anyway, and nothing I can see.
I have succeeded in copying and pasting the entire V1 part from an earlier saved version - it all seems to play back fine now. I will persevere using that , but I’d still love to know what was going on to produce the corrupted version.
Hello again. This problem has occurred again, so I have had to experiment further. I have found a solution, but I don’t understand why it works. Perhaps someone can explain?
To recap: a divisi V1 passage had become non-legato in playback. It was fine when I saved it, but when I reopened it, playback had become non-legato (although the notes in write-mode appeared unchanged). In Play-mode, I could see that the notes were all shortened.
“Reset playback overrides” had no effect.
However, if I switch off "Enable independent playback of voices, all the note lengths revert to their original lengths and retain that length when I switch it on again.
Is this a bug? Is there some fundamental concept that I’m not understanding?
I made a little video to illustrate but it’s too big to upload here, so I put it on youtube. Dorico playback anomoly - YouTube
What happens when you switch mode and come back to Play mode after doing something that appears to change the played durations of notes (i.e. their visual length changes)? Sometimes the Play view needs a refresh to update correctly.
Have you also tried changing the violin 1 instrument into a violin (to make sure the instrument info is correct)?
could you possibly post a relevant section of the project. I might be able to see what’s going on then. It can be tricky to diagnose this sort of thing because of what @Lillie_Harris pointed out that you often need to actually click on a note in the relevant line and play from there to get the Play window to update in terms of both correct note lengths and dynamics-- I’ve been caught out before
