More fun with voices.

Concerning this snippet of music: https://stash.miloonline.net/dorico/trombone_voices.png

The Dorico file is here.

Problems / Questions / Complaints:

  • I’m not hearing the upper staff at all. (Admittedly, this might just be an issue with my VST.)


  • During playback, the dynamics of the lower staff are overridden by the dynamics of the upper staff, despite the fact that they are assigned different MIDI channels.


  • Currently, the upper staff plays on channel 2, and the lower staff plays on channel 1. How do I switch them such that upper plays on 1, and lower plays on 2?


  • In the Play tab, why am I seeing, in the Dynamics lane, data for “Up-stem Voice 3” when I switch to “Up-stem Voice 2”?


  • Speaking of “Up-stem Voice 2” in the Play tab, how do I get rid of it, since there’s no music associated with it? (Saving and closing the file has no effect.)


  • It’s confusing to have the voices in the Write tab named similarly to the voices in the Play tab when they don’t actually match up (which can often happen for players of multiple staves). e.g. The upper staff is “Up-stem Voice 2” in the Write tab, but “Up-stem Voice 3” in the Play tab. It seems to me that a better syntax for voices would include a staff designation, e.g. “Staff 1 Voice 1,” or even something shorter like “s1_v1.” This could be shared between the Write and Play tabs, making the identification of voices on both tabs intuitive.

Please help, smart people. I thank you.

In this project you appear to have all voices routed to the same channel - ‘05 - Spitfire Brass B’, ch2. So most of the problems you describe come from the fact that they’re using the same channel.

We know that the naming of voices can be confusing. There’s some complexity here because there are multiple voices, divisi and multiple flows to consider, and we don’t currently have any good mechanisms for organising or labelling these at a higher level. So it can be hard to relate the voice you see in the project to the voice in playback. This is something we hope to improve in the future.

What do you mean? If I go to the Play tab, this is what I see:

https://stash.miloonline.net/dorico/trombone_voices.gif

Each voice is clearly on a separate channel, no? This works fine for me in other divisi sections.

You have separate voice playback enabled, but if you switch to the different voices in the voice dropdown then you’ll see that they’re all assigned to channel2 of the 05 Spitfire Brass B.

Sorry, Dr. Walmsley, what is the “voice dropdown”? It’s not this?

Yes, that’s correct. I can’t remember what we call that in the documentation, but internally we refer to that as the voice dropdown.

OK, well, as I demonstrated in the video capture, I’m seeing the voices assigned to different channels. They aren’t all channel 2.

Actually, Dorico has been crashing consistently of late. If I select the contents of every bar for a single staff in a flow, and some of the contents aren’t assigned to the default voice, then Dorico crashes when I attempt to switch to the Play tab. It’s also happened going from the Play tab to the Write tab. (EDIT: I don’t have to have anything selected. All I have to do is change a staff to divisi somewhere, then set all of the notes for that staff in the current flow to a new up-stem voice, then switch to the Play tab.)

The diagnostics are available here.

Thanks for the crash logs. They certainly seem to show a consistent pattern, but unfortunately I’m unable to reproduce the crash with an arbitrary project following the steps that you posted. Would you please be so kind as to provide the project file itself and steps to reproduce the problem? If you don’t want to post it here you can send it to me by email at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de.

Unfortunately, after removing the offending staff and adding the instrument to my score again, I’ve not been able to reproduce the issue.

I’ll see if I can do so using an older save. I’ll contact you immediately if I mange it.