Issues with the Mixer

Dorico
1

Three issues and a couple of thoughts about the mixer.

I have a template set up with Halion Sonic (2), Kontakt (1) and Pianoteq (7) - 10 instances in total. It’s essentially a sketch pad on which to develop, save and play back ideas. The reason for the large number of Pianoteq instances is that I haven’t found a way to make Pianoteq respond to midi channel numbers ( believe it only operates on a “main” channel basis)

The issues are

  1. The mixer has slowed to a crawl, it’s almost unusable. Scrolling, using the faders and buttons is just about possible but it takes forever. Is there a limit on the number of VST’s that can be loaded within a project?

  2. If I mute and then save the first track, the next time I open it up, even though it still shows that it’s muted, it plays back.

  3. I can’t play anything back while the mixer is on the screen. If I press the play button and then close the mixer, it will then play back.

Those last two issues may be a consequence of the mixer taking so long.

Thoughts are:

  1. It would be really good to have mute/solo and control buttons on the play screen itself and not just inside the mixer (much like Cubase and other DAW’s). To be completely honest, I would much prefer to see and be able control music while it’s playing back in notation form as opposed to the piano-roll (bet I’m not alone!).

  2. A large number of VST’s results in a very large number of inputs in the Mixer. I’m guessing this is part of the problem as to why it’s so slow. Going forward, might we be able stipulate how many inputs we want each VST to use, or can Dorico only show used inputs or can we just simply hide unused inputs? I’m probably missing something but I can’t really see a reason for unused inputs being included in the Mixer screen.

Usual apologies if any of this has been raised before. Mixer is one of those verboten words on here so it’s hard to search for other threads….

2

The slowdown occurs due to the handling of the large number of UI elements in our library framework. The audio engine itself should be able to manage that number of plugins quite happily. We haven’t yet had the opportunity to revisit the mixer code to optimise it. We do intend at some point in the future to make unused channels hideable, which will help.

I think I may have fixed the mute issue shortly after the 2.0 release. The tracks in Play mode did actually have the mute and solo buttons at one stage, but I had to hide them because they didn’t function correctly. Hopefully we’ll get them back in at some point - it’s one of many things on my list.

Re not being able to play back: this is most likely a window focus issue. Probably the last control you clicked on in the mixer has taken keyboard focus so the space bar is being directed to it. Try clicking on a background area and then press space

3

Thanks Paul - appreciated. And thanks for putting me right, I could have sworn I saw mute / solo buttons on the tracks at some stage!

4

You are quite correct - they were there at some stage, but had to be removed (temporarily) as they weren’t functional

5

I’m encountering this issue too. I’m currently scoring a film in Dorico 2 Pro and am using quite a few Kontakt and Best Service Engine VSTs alongside Noteperformer 3, but whenever I want to open the mixer to say, briefly mute the video sound for some reason it just takes forever to load up. When it finally does load up it then takes an age to respond to any inputs from me at all, whether that is scrolling to find the correct track or simply pressing the mute button. Hopefully there is some sort of fix in the works for this because it’s just about the only significant bugbear I have with using the program right now, I’m otherwise very happy with it.