I would love to have one big table (like Excel or Numbers), where I could add as many players and instruments, as I want to; change their names and positions, and then click „apply”. Only after the „apply” action Dorico would introduce changes to my score. It would save me a lot of time, especially in a big score, where every this kind of change is taking a lot of time.
I’d be happy if they’d A: Reorganize the groups into standard score order and B: Reopen the box with last one you had selected.
I sometimes wish Dorico had the Typeset button I love so much when using XeLaTeX… 
Nevertheless, an option has been recently added to renumber the layouts. I imagine it could be appropriate to have an option to manage the instruments… which could open a table where you do all your things about the players, instruments, order and then OK, and the big calculation begins — while you grab a coffee. It would mean a second workflow option, I cannot see this as a priority but the idea is appealing, especially when dealing with large scores.
Currently I am working on orchestral score and Dorico is very, very slow, when I am trying to menage the players. E.g. yesterday I decided to change all instrument short names by adding a dot after the name. And it took me about 5-7 minutes. Only adding a stupid dots to names…
And when I want to add e.g. 4 instruments, Dorico have to respace my score four times. It’s a waste of time, because first three times are unnececary – the circumstances are changing with every new instrument. So this „big calculation” would be much, much smaller than the sum of every subsequent change.
Del_Gesu, have you followed the usual advice?
- Open a single part layout.
- Close all other layouts.
- Save your project.
- Close your project.
- Open your project again.
Thank you, pianoleo, for the advise. I didn’t know about this usual solution. I did it, but it didn’t speeded up anything.
That workaround, suggested by the team, was meant to ameliorate problems of scale regarding project length. They do absolutely nothing (at least that I’ve noticed), in projects with a large number of players. These problems afflict Dorico from the get go in an orchestral project. This is something that really might need to be rethought, because, as willing as some may be to trade speed for scale, these kinds of operations really are beyond what’s reasonable…
It’s both. At least for me, speed seems largely proportional to total # of measures - e.g. 10 measures with 10 players is about the same a 1 player for 100 measures.
Any sort of large score is bad news and something the team really needs to focus on. Dorico is essentially unusable for symphonic scale scores.
Dorico is not unusable for symphonic scale scores – many users are working with scores of such scale with success. But it is certainly true that you need to have a reasonably powerful machine, ideally with four CPU cores and plenty of RAM, to work on large projects comfortably.
The workaround described by Leo above is specifically to help reduce the impact of operations in Setup mode that are carried out sequentially and each of which requires the layout you’re looking at to be recalculated almost from scratch. If you do a series of such operations while looking at the full score layout in a big project, you will have longer to wait than if you are looking at an instrumental part with just a single instrument in it, because it takes less time to calculate that layout. However, in order to have that speed increase, you do need to ensure that you have only one part layout visible in a single tab in a single window, then close and reopen the project before you start performing your Setup mode operations.
Thank you, Daniel, for advice, I will try to follow it.
But speaking about the power of machine:
I am working on Macbook Pro Retina (Mid 2015), which has 2,2 GHz Intel Core i7 (four cores) and 16 GB RAM and in many cases my work on the score is far from comfortable. But I wouldn’t say, that Dorico is unusable for symphonic scale scores. Surely it is, but sometimes I have to wait much longer, than – idealy – I would like to.
I wouldn’t say it’s unusable, either – in fact, that’s how I’m using it right now. But it is far from comfortable. Having the possibility to set operations and then applying them in one go, as you would do in master pages, would feel like progress, even if the behind the scenes working time is the same as all the small operations put together.