Because I’m a crazy man, I decided to spend some time this morning on an exercise designed to fully acquaint myself with the concept of groups; and in so doing, discovered an arcane, yet potentially important bug.
I decided to engrave a few bars of Vaughan Williams as the work is comprised of three separate strings orchestras. A string quartet, a full string orchestra and a chamber string orchestra of single decks of players for antiphonal use. I was able to imitate the original score layout – which often breaks down to a single system with to all three, or sometimes two combined orchestras to simplify the layout. I did this by creating yet a fourth group called Tutti orchestra, which is hidden in the first page (since it is empty then), but which appears in the score by itself when required by leaving the other groups empty and using judicious system breaks. These are then combined in part layouts in similar fashion by using breaks and hidden staves. Despite the fact that I would like better bracketing, this works extremely well, as can be seen in the examples below.
However, a very concerning bug occurred when putting layouts together. Three of the players – namely: solo violin II, solo viola, and solo cello – stopped appearing in the “players” context menu altogether, even when restarting the program. Scrolling did not do anything else but cycling back to the top or bottom.
Fortunately, I still had my initial solo quartet layouts, so I used those to build my section layouts (and it’s an exercise anyway, which I have now completed to my satisfaction – I learned a lot). But surely this could be a real concern for someone else if it were to occur for a professional project since we should have all players available for layouts. I have a feeling it is connected to the fact that I was using a lot of groups, but perhaps it is deeper than that. At any rate, I am working on a multiflow project for large orchestra where – despite having a couple of small groups – all players show up when invoking the layout context menu. As the file is already too large for the forum, I share it through Dropbox with the following link: