Admittedly, they are all only 14 bars in length, but it’s still over 7000 bars (per staff!).
Dorico is still reasonably responsive – there’s a lag of about 400ms in Note Entry, but I can happily keep entering notes and it will catch up eventually. (Unlike another app I used to use, the duration and pitch don’t get out of sync when buffering…)
The lag was only really noticeable after about 400 flows. Interestingly, there’s an additional delay when entering the first note of a newly created voice.
I’ve had to reorder the flows a lot, and ‘insert’ flows into the right place, either before or after note entry. It takes around 2.5 seconds for Dorico to process moving a flow from near the back to near the front.
Deleting flows takes a bit longer, just under 6 seconds. (This is on an M2 Pro Mac Mini.)
I’m particularly grateful for the recent update, which fixed a bug in Setup mode’s flow panel, when working with more than 100 flows!
On the whole, Dorico’s handling the whole thing very well. And there’s no other notation software in which I could ‘organize’ each chant live on the page.
It might be interesting to see how the responsiveness is for a 14,000 frame project of 1 Flow; either just 1 piano, or a larger ensemble.
I am working on a hymnal that has 530 hymns(flows) in a single Dorico project file. Yes a few seconds of waiting for some operations but still reasonably workable on my average i7-1360P laptop with 16GB Ram. Magical and I feel grateful!
And I’ve still got more to add! These are just double chants – there’s many more single chants; plus a handful of triple, quadruple and other weirdities.
Dorico is still surprisingly responsive, for the size of the data; and I could move flows around easily. (Could really use an “Insert New Flow” command, which adds one immediately after the selection.)
A total of 15,654 frames (which interestingly isn’t 602 x 14), and 50,096 notes!
One thing that would have been nice is to set the default tempo for the project in Playback Options, so that I don’t have to set, or change, 602 tempo marks…!
If I’m not mistaken, if you use Duplicate Flow, it will now insert the duplicate flow immediately after the original one. That might be useful should you attempt a project like this in future! (Obviously I know you want an empty flow rather than a copy of an existing one, but since the structure of each flow is identical, perhaps not so crazy to have one pre-populated with notes that you then delete or repitch?)
Yes, I used that a lot when I added another chant by an existing composer; but when inserting a new composer, I didn’t want things to get ‘polluted’ by other data, and easily confused by a bear of little brain.
You’ll be pleased to know that I’m now using the exported Text CSV file to create a list of composers with dates!
It is a lot of flows. The clear advantage of using one project is the easy update of various options and settings. Perhaps we will see batch updates for projects in the future, like Adobe FrameMaker.
Otherwise, I probably would run this through LaTeX, with all the bells and whistles it provides. But, updating anything in the music would be terror.
The CSV export is an excellent feature in Dorico. I use it to proof composer names, titles etc. against a database. With some easy programming, one can get very close to some of the functionality in LaTeX.
