I use custom instrument mappings for a few of VDL's suspended cymbals, placing all of the notes one ledger line above the staff and using careful pairings of noteheads and articulations to squeeze in all of the sounds in the maps. I don't know if the custom mappings are causing my sporadic problem or not, but I though it prudent to mention them.

Most of the time, the vast majority, suspended cymbal sounds play back properly. On rare occasions a loud short crescendo roll or a loud medium crescendo roll, as notated, will play back the sound for a long crescendo roll (not sure if it's loud or soft). I eventually figured out that if I put an instrument change to the appropriate cymbal instrument right before the roll is notated, it then plays back properly. However, the correct instrument is already in use prior to this.

Is there a reason this incorrect playback might be happening? I'm glad I have a fix for it now, but if there's something I can do to change my composition procedures it would be good to know. Perhaps some text somewhere is causing this, but text shouldn't affect which cymbal roll sound plays back, should it?

This sounds vaguely familiar to something I was experiencing about a year ago. Almost as if two instrument changes were needed to actually trigger the correct instrument change. Am I understanding that correctly? I never fully regressed the problem I was seeing, so I'm not exactly sure what was causing it. It's not something I've seen very often.

I don't think there should be any reason text is causing problems in a suspended cymbal part. They don't use any dictionary text.

Strangely enough, however, there are a few instances where Technique Text seems to get thrown in to the mix with sound IDs. It happened a few days ago and has a few other times, but I can't recall the specific combination of Instrument and Text that caused it. If I run across it again, I'll report it here.

It is a bit odd, but regardless of whether there are dictionary definitions for instruments, sometimes these little quirks seem to creep in.

[quote author=Jim Casella link=topic=3737.msg19706#msg19706 date=1278002827]Almost as if two instrument changes were needed to actually trigger the correct instrument change. Am I understanding that correctly?
[/quote]Not quite. Imagine if the below is music on a Sibelius staff:

[b]The following might have the problem:[/b]
[code][instrument change to sus. cym.] X X X X X X / / / /  Y Y Y Y Y   / / / / / / / / / / /  Z Z Z Z Z
                                    |          |         |               |                  |
                                some music   rests   more music      more rests    plays back incorrectly
[/code]

[b]But this fixes it:[/b]
[code][instrument change to sus. cym.] X X X X X X / / / /  Y Y Y Y Y   / / / / / / / / / / / [instrument change to sus. cym.] Z Z Z Z Z
                                    |          |         |               |                             |                    |
                                some music   rests   more music      more rests            shouldn't be needed...     plays back correctly
[/code]

Thanks for the creative illustrations, Joe. Nice work! Yeah, I think that's basically what I was trying to describe, but you were able to visualize it better above. It's odd, and is similar to what I was seeing that one time as well.

One thing that might help shed some light is to open just the part, then do a command for ";Score Info"; to view the listing of instrument changes that the entire part contains. Maybe the order in which the listed instrument changes appear will illuminate something. Maybe not. Just a thought.