Hi Dorico friends! I’m working on a big (30-minute) orchestra piece right now and am only about halfway done but the program is already working quite slowly for certain things. What are the best practices to prevent this?
Are there any settings I should have on or off?
I’ve already discovered that having condensing on really slows things down, so I have that off.
Does Galley view affect speed? Should I avoid using it? What about having multiple tabs for different score/part layouts open?
The lag is particularly long in going from Write mode to Engrave mode. I try to batch my “writing” and “engraving” tasks together as much as possible, but I still often have to go back and forth just to make things baseline legible as I write.
I did see a suggestion somewhere on here to split the flows up into multiple files until the end of the process and then import them into one file at the end. But that seems to mess up some of the formatting I’ve done.
If you’re halfway done, I wouldn’t do any formatting. Wait until all input is done. I don’t know whether this will be helpful as it’s a “workflow” thing.
Thanks–ideally that’s what i would do, but there are many pages that are not at all legible without some amount of formatting (probably due to the aleatory boxes and amount of text instructions I occasionally need). The result is staves colliding to the point of illegibility and text/rehearsal letters being pushed above the page. And also I need to be able to send out legible drafts to other people before the whole thing is complete, so I have to do some amount of formatting as I go–which is sometimes frustrating when I just have to re-do it later. So if anyone has suggestions for that kind of thing too, I’d appreciate it!
What kind of system are you running, @DrRabbits? Are you running with multiple tabs or windows on the same project open? Are you running an especially large display?
I have a 2019 macbook pro with Big Sur.
I’m not running an especially large display as far as I’m aware.
I did have a 2 separate tabs open for the same project that I was switching between frequently: one for a transposed conductors score layout and the other a galley view concert pitch score. I’ve now tried closing one of them, and it does appear to be a bit faster. Switching between the layouts still takes quite a bit of time, but doing things in the same layout is definitely faster than it was before, which is more important to me.
I’ve done all that needs to be done in my current project, except casting off the score. Because I need to have the condensed score showing, I do understand that that will slow things down, but even the command to move material from one system to the next (the indispensable ‘.’) takes up to a minute, and frame breaks more than that. I have shut down all other windows and tabs, and I do have a powerful processor (the file is 1,000+ bars for large orchestra, and no operation up till this stage has taken any more than a fraction of a second), but is there anything else I can do? As I write this I imagine that it might be useful to divide the project into its four individual flows and put it back together again, but are there any downsides to that which I’d need to know about before attempting it?
Condensing is a bit quicker if Dorico knows in advance what the contents of every system will be, so you might find that using the new Lock Layout command on the layout before you adjust the casting off makes a bit of a difference. I imagine running that command will itself take a decent amount of time, but it might make each subsequent casting-off command a little faster.
But I wouldn’t recommend splitting up the flows, because there’s no way to re-join them.