In Finale, you can apply music styles such as slash notation, “repeat one measure” and “hide staff” to any measure by selecting the staff menu and right-clicking on that measure. This time, we investigated the behavior of files with these staff styles applied when they were migrated to Dorico and Sibelius via MusicXML.
In conclusion, of the 12 staff styles that are thought to be frequently used, only slash notation and rhythmic notation were generally properly migrated to Dorico and Sibelius, and even these had bugs, which was a somewhat disappointing result.
(*In the case of Dorico, the default setting is to color slashes and bar repeats, but this setting can be canceled by unchecking “View menu > Highlight bar repeat areas (slash areas).”)
As in the previous article, results that I felt were “almost usable as is” are displayed in blue, results that I felt were “usable with minor modifications” are displayed in yellow, and results that I felt needed major modifications and attention are displayed in red.
Dorico is slightly better at reproducing “one-bar repeat notation” to some extent, but Dorico and Sibelius basically behave almost exactly the same when it comes to transferring staff styles.
Dorico | Sibelius | |
01. Slash notation | Generally they are migrated, but it applied on the wrong measures in the case of multiple staves. | Exactly the same as Dorico. |
02. Rhythmic notation | Generally they are migrated, but it applied on the wrong measures in the case of multiple staves. | Exactly the same as Dorico. |
07. 1-bar repeat notation | Migrated as measure repeat areas, but the notes must be manually deleted. | Not migrated at all. |
08. 2-bar repeat notation | Migrated as measure repeat areas, but the notes must be manually deleted. | Not migrated at all. |
12. Forced staff hiding (gap) | Not migrated at all. | Not migrated at all. |
13. Forced staff hiding (fill) | Not migrated at all. | Not migrated at all. |
14. Special notehead | Only diamonds and triangles are migrated. The other five types are not migrated. | Exactly the same as Dorico. |
15. Stemless note | Beams are split, but stems do not disappear and are not migrated. | Exactly the same as Dorico. |
17. X-notehead | Migrated, but beams are broken. | Exactly the same as Dorico. |
18. Blank measure | Notes disappear, but so do whole rests. | The transition is perfect, with the notes disappearing and only whole rests remaining. |
20. Finale Alphanote (note name) | Not migrated at all. | Exactly the same as Dorico. |
21. Finale Alphanote (scale name) | Not migrated at all. | Exactly the same as Dorico. |
Both Dorico and Sibelius have a function to hide staves, but they do not seem to be compatible with MusicXML, so it seems that you need to set it again after importing.
Note that Dorico and Sibelius do not seem to have a function to hide the staves of only specific bars in a system, as in bars 14-15 of the Finale example, so this needs to be reproduced using another ways, such as covering them with blank shapes.
The same goes for Alphanotes, which are note heads that display note names and scale names; you must re-set them to similar note heads after importing.
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One thing to note about slash notation and rhythmic notation is that they seem to migrate without any problems if there is only one staff, but for instruments with multiple staves such as the piano or harp, there is a problem that the range that should be applied is shifted by one bar.
This is the state of the original Finale file.
If you export this in MusicXML and import it into Dorico or Sibelius, you will see that the range of application is shifted forward by one bar in both cases in the bass staff.
I guess this is probably a bug, and Dorico and Sibelius behave exactly the same, and although the behavior is slightly different in MuseScore, a similar problem was observed.
I think this is mainly a problem with big band scores. This also appears to be migrated normally at first glance when you only look at the music score to which it is migrated, so like the dynamics we covered in the previous article, there is a high risk of overlooking it if you are not aware of the problem in advance.
This seems to be a general problem with grouped staves. Tablature is an exception, but it can occur not only with pre-grouped instruments like piano, harp and organ, but also with instruments you create by grouping multiple staves yourself.
Note that this only seems to happen with slash notation and rhythmic notation, not with x-noteheads or “blank measures”.