Dorico 3 issues

I’m on Dorico 3 and upgraded from Dorico 2 assuming that I’d have better performance and less bugs. That does not seem to be the case. Any ideas on the below?

  • Periodically, Dorico seems to lose connectivity with my Midi keyboard (Nektar 88 ). I’ll be entering notes fine until some point when I’ll press some keys and they won’t appear in Dorico. I have to restart Dorico to get it working again. This never happened in Dorico 2.

  • The page jumps around randomly sometimes when I enter a note on the Midi keyboard. And other times when I delete some notes or change a rhythm, the the page jumps somewhere else, or where I was goes out of view. I suppose Dorico is re-calculating layout or something - is there a setting where I can turn this behavior off? It’s very annoying trying to get into a creative flow when they page is jumping around in a haphazard fashion.

  • Dorico 3 seems more sluggish than Dorico 2. I’m not working with large projects, but sometimes simply copying/pasting notes or deleting notes etc. can take a few seconds. This kind of thing should be instantaneous in order to be productive.

I’m on a 2014 windows 8.1 machine with 8gb ram. Not the most recent laptop in the world, but works fine running Cubase 9.0 and other auudio apps.

The problem with the MIDI keyboard losing connectivity is affecting a number of users, mostly (though not exclusively) on Mac. The good news is that we believe we have a fix for this problem, which will be included in the next update.

The problem you describe with the score view moving apparently at random is something that we will need some more help from you to investigate. I’m sure you realise that almost nothing in software is truly random, so when the music moves unexpectedly, there will be some common feature of the edit you’re performing, and/or the specific zoom level, position of the music on the screen, nature of the existing selection, etc. that will be precipitating the unwanted movement. If you’re able to pin down the circumstances a little better, we’d be very glad to look into it.

Some users have also experienced that the video engine in Dorico 3 has higher CPU usage than in Dorico 2 on the same system, which is something that our video engine team are looking into. In the meantime you might want to check this earlier thread.

For the issue of Dorico’s jumping around, I’ve found that it can help if you make sure nothing is selected whenever you’re not actively entering something. If you happen to be looking at a certain part of your score but something is selected somewhere else, if you happen to press a key [inadvertently] the display will usually jump to what was selected. I’ve found this to be most disconcerting and, depending on the key I pressed, Dorico has even performed unwanted edits which, due to my confusion at being torn away from what I was looking at, I didn’t notice at the time. This has happened less to me since I’ve made it a habit to make sure nothing is selected before scrolling anywhere else. Hope this helps.

I just had this extremely disconcerting jumping around again, despite my having made sure beforehand that nothing was selected. It happened when I opened the properties panel, at which moment the display jumped to a seemingly random spot about 20 pages away from what I was looking at and it took me some time to find my place again. Perhaps this description isn’t helpful to the programmers but I did nevertheless want to add it to the myriad other reports of this behaviour.

If you’re using one of the “fit…” zoom levels, then when you change the window geometry, e.g. by opening or closing one of the panels, that’s going to cause the zoom level to change (as it should), and that may also result in the music moving left or right.

But 20+ pages?!

Depending on the length of the project (i.e. if it’s very long), I’d guess it’s possible.