3.1 - Condensing speed?

The new condensing abilities are really amazing! Fantastic new capabilities with this! Has anyone else noticed a massive drop in speed when using condensing though? With a large orchestral score, even just selecting some “a2” labels to hide takes several seconds now and I seem to recall that being more or less instantaneous with Condensing in 3.0. Similarly, just using Ctrl-Alt-arrow to move some objects around in Engrave takes a couple of seconds, and that was definitely instantaneous for me in 3.0.

My desktop system is pretty fast:
Windows 10, i9-9900K @ 3.60 GHz, 8 core, 64 gigs RAM, OS and Dorico on a m.2 SSD drive.

Test score is for full orchestra, 143 measures, 1 flow, so nothing terribly demanding. Just wondering if anyone else has noticed a huge drop in speed vs condensing in 3.0.

Condensing was slow in Dorico 3.0 and it’ll still be slow in Dorico 3.1, I’m afraid. In our tests adjusting the position of items lke dynamics and slurs is a bit faster in 3.1 than in 3.0, but in general condensing is slow because it has to perform a lot of calculations over large chunks of the music after every edit. However, if you really feel the same project is much slower with condensing on in 3.1 than in 3.0, please do send it to me by email at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de and we’ll take a look to see if we can figure out what might be different.

Thanks Daniel! Just emailed the file to test. I assume you probably won’t have the same text fonts installed, but I imagine that shouldn’t affect the condensing speed at all.

I also experienced performance problems with condensing in Dorico Pro 3.0. The improvements in 3.1 are remarkable, to the point that far less editing is necessary so the slight delays that remain are not really an issue. If anything, I have noticed quite an improvement in speed when using condensing.

I also upgraded my computer from a quad core Windows 10 machine to the one listed below. The difference is like night and day. To be fair, I also am getting more comfortable with Dorico and making fewer stupid mistakes that need editing once condensing in invoked. Today, for example, I was able to condense a large work for concert band and complete all the final editing without undue delay even though there were quite complex parts being combined. Given the power of the algorithm used to do the condensing, I am willing to take a breath once in a while.

Thanks. This is a real game changer.

Glad to hear you’re finding the editing speed improved, David. We’re looking into more performance improvements for condensing at the moment, and we believe there are a few further things we can do to speed it up further. Whether or not we’re able to release those improvements in the near future or they will have to wait for a future larger release remains to be seen.