I’m porting into Dorico an arrangement of the Brahms Requiem I made some time ago. It uses piano and organ and each movement is a separate xml file which I’m importing into flows. In general, the results are reasonably good, but each time I create a new flow from an xml file, Dorico duplicates the organ (but not the piano or the voices), despite my selecting ‘merge players’. So now, after 7 movements, I have 7 groups of organs, one for each movement. Does anyone know why this is happening and if there’s any way to consolidate the organ parts, other than to create a new file and import everything?
It happens to me too when I combine Dorico flows or xml’s from other programs.
The best way to handle it I have found is is to choose one organ Player (for example) and then to drag the organ Instruments into that Player. Then open the Layout for that combined part in Galley mode where you can see all the organ staves. Presumably no flow contains more than one active organ part.
I suppose you could just leave the layout that way and see the active organ instrument in each flow, but either I am a purist or worry that I might have overlooked something that will cause problems later. So I drag the notes from all my “duplicate” parts into the top organ grand staff (and pedal staff) and then later delete all the now empty instruments from the organ Player.
In order to avoid doing something stupid, I usually do this work on one or more copies of the original file until I am sure I have everything right. (I don’t think I have ever deleted any of the working files either; I am that paranoid and , I supposed, still blessed with spare HD space.)
Thanks, Derrek. I tried dragging the organ instruments into other instances of the same instrument but the only result was that the organ staves received numbering which I couldn’t get rid of. Strangely, in Galley View there were also no extra staves, so nowhere to copy music and no extra staves to delete. Perhaps my best bet is to make a new, blank file and copy everything into it. I still don’t understand why this happens and, especially, why only to the organ parts and not to any of the choir parts or the piano. part
To see all the organs in galley view, make sure the layout containing the combined organs is activated/checked for all flows.
As far as having each flow replicate an instrument, I am not sure why it does in some cases and not in others; but I wish it did not. It may have to do with the VST slot used in the source flow or XML: not sure and have not investigated.
I suggest you create a layout containing just the seven organ players, then copy and paste the music from each movement onto the first organ, then delete the unwanted extra organ players once you have copied all the music across. Dorico will be finding some differences between the instruments in the incoming MusicXML file and the existing organ player, otherwise it would be merging them, but without seeing at least a couple of the files in question I can’t say with any certainty what is happening. As I have posted here literally hundreds of times, if you need help with diagnosing a problem that is specific to a particular project or projects, you need to provide those projects.