As computing power has increased, so have the capabilities as well as demands of all software, in a constant back-and-forth correlation.
8 GB is very little by today’s standards, and 16 is the minimum I would recommend to anyone, even if they aren’t using professional music apps. With even regular web browsers like Chrome with a handful of tabs open, plus email clients and various background tasks or menubar apps, you can already eat up to 4GB+ on that kind of stuff alone. 8 doesn’t leave room for much flexibility opening music apps and larger project files.
DAWs are typically worse and more demanding than Dorico. With audio apps I would go for 32GB and higher if possible.
I’m experiencing the same delay in note entry. Windows 10, 64GB RAM, Intel i7-8700 processor, 3.20 GHz. I’m working on a theatre score, so there are 22 players and 25 flows (and a few more to come). The file size itself is 13,809KB. Re-booting the computer helps for a few minutes but then Dorico just can’t keep up with me. I have to slow way down. I don’t have anything else running. It’s frustrating as I was just starting to get comfortable using Dorico (I’m a long-time Finale user) when this started to happen.
I believe 192 GB memory should be more than enough for a single notation app. I record entire orchestras with it using most of the major libraries on the market today. As mentioned earlier, although I see this issue on both platforms with big enough scores, it seems to be worse under Windows as of now. Unfortunately I don’t really use my Macbook Pro for music/audio work.
Alright:
I downloaded Part 1, opened it, set PT to Silent and saved in my Dorico version, the latest available.
Opening the file from the hub: 17 sec
Switching from uncondensed full score layout to the condensed one: 10 sec
Selecting the entire first flow in condensed view using the system track in Write Mode page view and transposing everything up one octave: 12 sec.
For the second flow this takes 16 sec.
Switching to concert pitch in condensed: 33 sec
I could easily work like this.
Machine specs: Win 11, i5-12600K, 64 GB RAM, all NVMe SSDs PCIe 4.0.
With an i7-8700, compared to which mine is ca. 60% faster, those times could indeed be a little longer…
Opening: 15.6s
Condensed to Uncondensed: 5.9s
Uncondensed to Condensed: 8.0s
Transpose up octave while Condensed: 8.2s
Switch to Concert while Condensed: 26.2s
MacBook M3 Pro, 36 GB, docked into CalDigit TS4, with a bunch of additional drives including 4 NVMe in an OWC Express 4M2.
Anecdotally, I engraved an entire full-scale opera in Dorico through 2023 and beginning of 2024. Started in Dorico 4, upgraded to 5 mid-project (stupid, I know). Two acts, each act in its own project file, with plenty of divisi, stave hiding, and condensing in both the full score and string parts. While there was certainly a slow-down in each file as the engraving progressed, it was nothing so bad that it hindered the work. With condensing on, input is slow. But its easy enough to turn it on and off as needed (and if you save it for the end, its not really needed until implementing corrections).
For comparison, I engraved an oratorio of similar scope with Sibelius in 2016-2017. By the time I was about halfway through, input started to slow down noticeably to the point where any single edit would take 2 or 3 seconds each.
One thing I’ve figured out for large scores: For any temporary changes that result in a lot of processing (condensing changes, staff visibility, staff size on a break, note spacing, etc.), create the corresponding reset first so that Dorico does not spend time processing the change past the point where it needs to.
I’m seeing the exact opposite. Note input in Dorico is slowing down dramatically even in modest size scores. For example, on a 25 page large orchestral score, each note or chord I enter in takes up to a 1 second to appear in the score. If I add a bunch of notes or chords quickly in a row, the time it takes for all notes to appear keeps adding up. If I open the same score in Sibelius, all notes appear in the staff immediately no matter how fast I play them. I’ve actually never seen input in Sibelius slow down regardless of the score size.
Switching back to Page view: 27 seconds Window.ToggleLayoutAspectType (27824 ms)
Windows 10, Intel i7-9750H, 16GB of RAM.
Of course when trying this in my own small project file that I mentioned above, note entry times were back to normal (about .2 seconds per note). I rarely have other programs open besides Dorico other than Chrome and Acrobat. When I encounter that slowness again in a small project file, I’ll time some actions again and create a Diagnostics report.
Well, it seems to be like it always is with computers:
You want to process large amounts of data, you need a fast machine. In the Intel world, 12th Gen and higher.
You need a lot of RAM, 32GB, 64 is better.
You need SSD storage, PCIe 4.0 4x is best at the moment.
Dorico is like any other large, professional productivity suite in that regard, as that it is growing in functionality and complexity (I’m looking at you, Condensing!) along with available horsepower…
There isn’t much difference between my i5 12th Gen and an Apple M3, so anything at that level or above seems to handle even a large project with reasonable speed.
CPUs older than 10th Gen seem to struggle. Such is computing, alas!
This is not the first post on the subject, and there have been many responses from the team on the subject. If I may summarize:
Dorico does loads more processing than other apps.
Certain notation requires more processing than others – condensing, percussion, “regions”, cues, etc.
Arguably, if you’re still entering notes, condensing should be off.
Sound libraries can also have an effect.
If you are experiencing notably slower performance than other people (hardware differences aside); or one roguishly leaden project file, then you’ll need to submit the document and diagnostic logs to one of the team.
Obviously, they want to improve the performance of large scores, and there have been optimizations in many of the updates.
It’s not the first post on the subject, there’s been many apparently. Seems to be because a number of these issues carry on from version to version. I’ve been doing this and working with these companies since audio/midi software was just starting to get popular in the professional world. The reason why Finale has been abandoned after decades of time because they never really made any real improvements, especially in performance. We use to be in constant contact with their tech support sending them reports on bugs and issues. I finally had a rep tell me years ago that if they had to spend all their time fixing problems, they would never have the time to work on releasing a new (paid) version each year. We went from paying for a new upgrades every year, to every 2-3 years or so, and then finally stopped upgrading altogether since there was really no point any longer.
I’ve been in direct contact with Steinberg tech support regarding these issues as well. I do extensive testing with these products before sending tech reports. I’ve even beta tested for a few of them over the years. I’m well aware of the suggestions that people have made so far on this post, and most have been good. And yes, every computer system on the market will have slightly different performance results. The main point is that if software companies spent more time working on improving the performance of their products, as they do with constantly trying to add more features to appeal to new customers, the actual users of these products would not have to spend as much time dealing with all the headaches in the first place, myself included.
I understand your frustration and have experienced slower scores as well, but hopefully you’ve seen from other posts that this is absolutely a huge priority for the team.
I can also add, as a relatively early adopter of Dorico since v2, I have experienced dramatic performance improvements across updates since then. I recall that v3 to v4 was particularly significant. I have full confidence in the dev team to continue refining and improving Dorico’s performance and workflow, especially now that the new Cubase score editor is released.
So it does seem that the length of the score is a major factor regarding this issue. Even if I open up a new, empty score, adding notes at first is super fast. However, if I keep gradually adding a 100 or so extra bars at a time, input starts to slow down quite a bit, even in an empty document. This may have something to do with the way Dorico attaches notes and objects to measures and the flow in general. And again, comparing the same file on Windows and the Mac, the Mac is definitely faster with input, even though my Mac is older and not as powerful as the desktop PC.
Hopefully they can get this working a bit better in the future. Dorico definitely has a lot of potential. But when working on projects with strict deadlines, anything that slows down the process could be an issue.
It would be interesting to compare the log files on both the Mac and PC to compare the various timings.
I suspect there’s a bottleneck somewhere in your PC. It could be RAM, RAM connection, drive, drive connection, chipset, various cache sizes, swap file size (although probably not this one with the amount of RAM you have), etc. Some you might be able to resolve, others (like chipset) you won’t. If you’re not already familiar with computer architecture, it’s a deep rabbit hole.
Seems that would be odd though since I’m not the first one apparently to report these issues on the forum (although I don’t know what other kinds of systems people were using, or if they were on Mac, PC, or both).
What’s odd to me is not that it slows down for you, but the wide discrepancy from what you report and my 4-year-old Windows desktop on the same file. It definitely slows on my machine, just not nearly as bad as yours, which has more RAM. Not sure about the particular CPU differences. You have more cores, but clock speed is still king in most things, and you haven’t given those details. Still, I suspect any potential bottleneck won’t merely be horsepower.
On larger scores, I’m seeing about a 1/2 - 1 second delay upon input of notes or chords on average (as opposed to instantaneous on smaller scores). However, if you play a bunch of notes or chords in quickly one after the other, the delay will build up as Dorico tries to keep up. The machine is a Dell workstation with Intel Xeon W-2265 CPU 12-core at 3.5 GHz per core (up to around 4.7 GHz w/turbo boost) and Windows 11 Pro. Audio interface is an RME Fireface 802.
