I’ve got a score with 10 instruments and 40 bars in one flow. The file size is 3.027 KB. After deleting 7 instruments and several bars (only 5 bars left) I saved the project as a new file and the size is still 2.940 KB. Seems like Dorico keeps lots of information (as a backup?) in the file. Will someone be able to recreate what I just deleted from that file?
Good question - I was also thinking about this when Daniel asked me to post a file as attachment to a bug report some time ago. I deleted 95% of the content, but filesize did shrink only marginally.
About 95% of the file size is the audio engine data. As a rough guide, about 2Mb per HALion instance (per 16 instruments). The actual score data is tiny. So deleting musical content won’t make much change to the file size.
I deleted 7 from 10 instruments. That means, that the audio data from the deleted instruments will be preserved?
And back to my other question: will anybody be able to recreate what was deleted from the file?
No, that means that the information regarding which Halion instruments you’d used (and if you’d made any tweaks to those sample sets) would be preserved, so basically it’s useless information to anyone apart from you. The actual note data is gone. No audio is saved within a Dorico project.