Condensing performance enhancement request

So I started using the condensing feature yesterday. It is amazing. But it is slow to load a large project when this is turned on in the edit menu.

So what about the possibility of allowing to freeze condensing on a per flow basis so that one can enable condensing to compute on a single flow while editing. Then turning on freeze will freeze the result so it doesn’t need to compute it each time one loads the project or whatever other reason it would restart a compute cycle.

Thanks for the suggestion, but “freezing” condensing is not something that is supported by the design. We will of course look at ways to improve the performance of the software when condensing is enabled.

I‘m exploding a sketch into a score at the moment, and just to try out what it can do, I enabled condensing for the final score. My impression is that Dorico now becomes slower and slower, as I paste/explode more music, even if the condensed score is not actually in foreground (I‘m mostly working in subgroup scores only consisting of the source and target staves I‘m working on, no Page view). Dorico 2 seems to be considerably faster with this score, so may this be a connected issue?
My mobile machine is not that fast (Surface Pro 4 i5), but Dorico becomes nearly unuseable, e.g. thinking several seconds before moving a single note a step up or down. I cannot find the hardware limits, though: Processor and RAM Are both at about 50%… any ideas?

If the condensed layout is not visible but is open in another tab or window, then Dorico is still doing all the work, because if you switch back to that tab or window, you would expect it to already be updated. If you don’t want to experience the performance penalty of condensing, then work with a single tab in galley view or in page view but with condensing switched off.

Sorry for this interruptive question: Will the amount of CPU cores affect the performance of condensing large orchestral scores in Dorico 3?
(The CPU of Mac Pro 2013 is upgradable, hence my question.)

The answer is, as usual, “it depends”. In general, the more CPU cores you have with the faster the clock speed, the better the performance of processes like condensing will be, but I wouldn’t necessarily advise running out and spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on upgrading the CPU in your Mac Pro purely on the basis that it will speed up condensing. I would hope that it is more likely we can make greater improvements through optimisation than you would get simply by throwing more and faster transistors at the problem.

Hi Daniel,
thanks for replying back. You‘re right, switching off condensing brings the performance back. It seems that I have to switch it off in all layouts, though; just closing tabs or changing them to galley view does not help.

I‘ll appreciate any improvements in that area, because especially since condensing changes are not yet available, you have to change between score layouts to optimize the result. As it seems the hardware also still has potential, so you‘ll probably find some ways… at least that won’t prevent me from purchasing the 3.0 upgrade any longer now. :wink:

I’ve been converting a rather large score to be compatible with condensing. I’m halfway through a 120 page score with 18 staves condensing to 9. It is going rather well now that I’ve figured out most of the issues involved. So kudos to the development team on this feature. It is extremely good.

In the process of converting I’ve noticed that looking at a split window with Page view in one tab and Galley view in the other, it’s cumbersome to match up the parts being edited. It would be very useful (and I suspect much faster given what has been said above) to have a mechanism in galley view to enable/disable the condensed result just above the staves being condensed. And if this was available on a per condensed staff basis, then one could just view a single set of condensing staves at a time for maximum performance. It would also be easier to track where one is in the editing process.