Can Dorico 2.1 handle 300 flows in one file?

Dorico
1

Hi,

I have a project where the flow workflow would help me. But I would need about 300 flows in one file.
Can Dorico 2.1 handle this without crash or massive slow-down?

Best, Ben

2

It depends on how large the flows are. If they are small one-liners of a few bars, a good system will handle them fine. But longer flows with many instruments will cause speed to degrade. Two things however:

  1. There is a bug - already fixed in the developer’s builds but not available until the next update - which affects the system track in galley mode. The system track must be disabled for such a project.
  2. When working on such a project, it is important to leave the score set up so that each new flow starts on a new page until the very end of the project. I’s best to switch to allowing flows to start on the same page at the very end of the editing process: such a large number of flows will slow down the system considerably once they are allowed to share pages. It’s not that you can’t do it, but it should be kept for after all notes are entered.
3

Thank you for your feedback, Claude!

I’ll maybe give it a try as soon the project starts.
It is for a new print run of a songbook; I made the first print with Sibelius. But it almost drove me crazy how much work was needed just for the layout. I even had to use Adobe Acrobat to fix some issues. Hopefully the change to Dorico will solve these problems…

Best, Ben

4

I typeset a hymnal (350 songs) in Finale and did them as individual files, then laid them out in InDesign. I’m interested in Dorico’s powerful page editor, but unsure if I want to change my workflow for such a large project.

5

I think one important consideration is that the Flows panel is really not useful once you have more than a couple of dozen flows at most. Imagine trying to take flow 299 and swap places with flow 2: it’s basically impossible. In the future we do plan to provide an alternative view of the Flows panel to make these kinds of larger projects easier to work with, but in the meantime I would recommend keeping the number of flows to a few dozen at most, and consider combining multiple projects with that order of number of flows for the final project.

6

My idea was to use one flow per song and use an additional flow, where I insert each frame and do the layout.
Would this currently work?

Without house-style ex-/import working with multiple files seems unpractical when changing some style related settings.

7

I use a layout for the flow (or couple) that I’m working on, with others disabled. If it’s a well-planned project, that doesn’t require moving flows too much, the benefits outweigh the trouble.

8

Ben, rather than exporting the styles and settings from one project and importing them into another, you can instead save a copy of the project that has the settings you want to reuse, then delete all the flows and players from it, then import flows from one or more other Dorico projects into that empty project, and the incoming flows will all adopt the settings of the empty project. So it’s the reverse of the “import house style” approach: you instead import the music into the project that has your house style.

9

Thank you all for your feedback!
I will see what works best for me.

10

I have three projects with 100 flows. Adding the 101st flow started causing problems with the flows panel, but that was back in 1.X. Perhaps that particular problem has been addressed by now.