moving via alt-left slows down / perfomance issue

Dorico
1

Unintentionally and somehow I activated INSERT mode, without taking notice, and so caused a terrible chaos in some of my staffs.
Ctrl-Z … would have killed to much work done.
so I tried to fix it by moving things back to their intended position, e.g.

  • selected from first wrong note up to flow end
  • pressed several times (9x) alt-left (with a eigth note selected as raster value).
  • this took a significantly increasing amout of time, first reaction was nearly instantly, completing the last key command time took about 30 sec…
    there must be something wrong.
2

Firstly, always try Ctrl-Z before doing anything else. Until you’ve tried it you can’t possibly know how much work will be “killed” - the chances are, very little!
You haven’t told us how much music there is between the first wrong note and the flow end. If it was 8 notes, I wouldn’t expect it to take long. If it was 8 pages I’d expect it to take a while. Dorico’s potentially doing a lot of thinking, each time you move a chunk of music, and that takes time.

3

taguluche,

I came across a similar situation last week. I tried to move about six bars of music. The trouble came when I used the (in my case on High Sierra) alt/option left arrow repeatedly. Probably invoking successive attempts to move before the previous one had actually completed.

I suspect that, although I imagined I was only moving, say 25-30 notes, Dorico was struggling to keep up.

I learned my lesson and now use cut and paste.

As pianoleo wisely says, Dorico is doing a significant number of things during this operation. Fabulous software that it is, I guess it also makes sense not to try and tax it too much :slight_smile:

4

Incidentally, RAM doesn’t seem to make any difference, and (surprisingly) neither does processor-speed (or number of cores). My quad-core machine doesn’t seem to achieve this kind of task much quicker than my two-core machine.

5

pianoleo,

Agreed. I have a fast machine. I suspect it’s something to do with the way that Dorico keeps track of what’s ‘waiting’ in the keyboard buffer as opposed to actually swapping chunks of notes in and out of RAM/Virtual RAM.

Overload that by several times trying to move multiple bars before it’s finished tidying up loose ends, and it’s asking too much. I’ve learnt my lesson, though, and am quite happy with Cmnd-X Cmnd-V :slight_smile: