Moving notes to another voice causes Dorico to freeze

Dorico
1

I unintentionally deleted my post, so I have to write it again…
Anyway, when I move notes to another voice, Dorico freezes and after about five seconds becomes responsive again. This becomes pretty annoying if you have to move notes from one voice to another voice on a regular basis like I had to do the last few days.
Is this is a known issue? If yes, is there a solution for it, or do I have to wait for an update?

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  1. It is possible to un-delete a deleted post. Click the ••• icon for more controls.
  2. Really, every time you move notes to another voice? I get the delay when Dorico is doing an auto-save, but not for simple edits like that.
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Can you tell us a bit more about your project, @Menno_Bosgra, and about the capabilities of your computer? Is your project especially huge and demanding? What kind of computer are you using?

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My computer is Windows 11 (x64), i7-8700 CPU, 64Gb of RAM, all software on SSD, Dorico on another drive than the OS.
The project is small: two flows, instrument is piano, nothing else.

1st flow has 8 bars in it
2nd flow 62 bars, first 20 bars filled with notes, 2 up-stem voices, 2 down-stem voices, no difficult rhythms or time signatures.
I said Dorico becomes unresponsive for about five seconds, but this was a bit too much; counting shows it’s about 2-3 seconds, sorry for that.

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Can you take a little screen recording of the edit taking place and share it here, @Menno_Bosgra, together with the project itself so we can try to replicate it?

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Hi Daniel,

Please find enclosed the requested video.
Note the 2nd bar where I select the lowest notes, then I right-click to select the option to move the notes to Down-stem voice 1. After Dorico executes this command, you can see my pointer moving to the left, clicking on notes in the 1st bar, but Dorico doesn’t respond for about five seconds.

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Do you have hundreds of VST instruments/effects installed on your computer? If so, please make sure you’ve updated to Dorico 4.0.31. Hopefully you will find that makes the application more responsive in general.

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Hi Daniel,

Yes, I do have lots of VST’s and effects installed, but never had this issue in Dorico 3.5. I already updated to 4.0.31 as soon as the update was launched, but I’m not sure if I felt this was much better, but will check again tomorrow.

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Unfortunately I’m not getting better results. As long as there is only one VST active, there’s not much of a problem and waiting time is about a second (or two), before I can continue to work. But as soon as I add a few extra VST’s, everything becomes as slow as it was when I started this thread.
Like I wrote above: this behavior is new to me. I never had any issues in Dorico 3.5 or earlier versions, no matter how many VST’s there were present in the score.
Am I the only one with this problem?

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Can you please run the software and do a couple of operations that you find very slow, then do Help > Create Diagnostic Report within the same session (i.e. without quitting Dorico), and attach the resulting zip file here?

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Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your reply. The only thing I find slow is the changing of voices, so I performed some of those before creating the attached .zip file.

Dorico Diagnostics.zip (2.0 MB)

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Thanks – we will take a look at this data and I’ll come back to you when I can.

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As an aside, I was working on my Win10 PC the other day (Dorico Pro 4) and was faffing about in Play mode adding sample libraries when Dorico hung. Checking out Task Manager revealed it was the Audio Engine which was choking up. Killing both Dorico and the Audio Engine sorted it. After counting to 10 then re-launching it all ran fine. So, it could be the Audio Engine?

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@Menno_Bosgra, would you mind attaching the actual project you’re working on? It looks like you might be in the unusual situation of both using independently routed voices (so that each voice in your piano part can be routed to a different device/channel in Play mode) and using the Silence playback template. Is that correct?

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648.dorico (2.0 MB)

Here’s the project.
Your conclusion is partially correct: Dorico is indeed in silence mode (didn’t know I had selected that one, but okay).
IRV isn’t turned on, so all voices are routed to the same channel.
Most obvious solution for now appears to be selecting a playback template, so I will give that a try.

Looking forward to hear your findings.

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Well, I selected a Playback Template and now everything works fast and smooth!

I must say I’m impressed by your knowledge and that you found this could be the problem.
Before I check the ‘Solution’ box, I will wait for your reply just to be sure that there’s nothing else going on in the file.

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Yes, you can thank my colleague Paul for spotting what was going on. The diagnostic report includes a trace file from the current session that we can load into a visualiser and see which specific operations are taking the time. Paul was able to see that Dorico was spending time trying to set up various Mixer channels when the new voice was created, which it shouldn’t do when you use the Silence playback template in any case; we will ensure that in future it doesn’t try to do this when Silence is selected.

1 Like
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Thanks, Daniel, for your explanation. Then I owe Paul a big ‘thank you’ for finding the issue. Really great work and highly appreciated!