Dorico on MBP M1 Pro

Dorico
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It is really cool. And it’s great too because you can change the tuning, volume, etc. etc. to match your ensemble. The thing is, it’s not actually that complicated, especially if you built it based on a normal pre-midified keyboard rather than pipe organ keyboards that need wiring. Plop a midi keyboard in a box, hook up a few powered monitors and go.

I have used a bare-bones keyboard with external speakers just set on the floor up in our organ loft multiple times since my arrival here and it’s always worked really well. There are also excellent harpsichord samplesets (Mietke) which are a lot of fun and have wayyyyy more realism and detail than standard keyboard samples. I’ve used my rig with harpsichord to do Handel a few times and we have good fun.

I’ve also debated rigging up a semi-permanent harpsichord at home. I thought about building something akin to a clavichord but rather than having a sound board, having a MMG electrostatic panel mounted horizontally in its place. I bet the effect would be stunningly real.

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:rofl: :joy:

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Ok, I was curious, so I looked up the actual limit. And I quote:

“The Advanced Edition of Hauptwerk allows a polyphony up to 32,768 simultaneous pipes …”

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Just an update to this: Here’s a Memory usage chart from a 16Gb M1 Pro, with Dorico playing the opening of the Matthew Passion, (18 staves, with OT Miroire samples of about 0.5 Gb each).

M1 16 Memory
M1 16 Memory1182×200 68.8 KB

The system was already dealing with more memory than it had, spilling out onto the disk, and using a considerable amount of memory compression. Despite this, there was no noticeable effect on performance.

The SSD is very quick (faster than DDR2 RAM was!) and the number of memory channels is much higher than usual, so swapping in doesn’t seem to have much of a penalty. It would be interesting to try running something absurdly large like Hauptwerk on it.

All that having been said, I made the decision to return the 16Gb model and have just received a 32Gb one.

Here’s the same on a 32Gb M1 Pro:

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 11198×218 59.7 KB

You’ll notice that in both cases, “Memory Used” and “Cached Files” add up to the total amount of memory. In short, the OS fills the RAM with whatever it can. In both cases, I’ve got other apps open, like Safari, Mail, etc. The WindowServer is using over 1Gb for starters.

While both models may perform equally well in most circumstances, and I’m not overly concerned about high levels of swap having any impact on the lifespan on the SSD: I just felt happier with the machine having a bit more ‘headspace’ and ability to deal with increasing loads in the future.

Having spent ‘some money’ on this, I didn’t want to get a couple of years in and then regret not having the RAM.

As Wallace Simpson said, “you can never be too thin or have too much RAM”.

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Thank you @benwiggy , that’s useful advice for a real world scenario relevant to our use case (not like most youtubers whose use case is unsurprisingly making videos).