Orchestral files in Dorico with Apple M1 & 16gb of ram

I would appreciate input from Dorico users about whether M1-equipped Macs with 16gb of ram can comfortably handle note input and playback of orchestral files using one or another of the full related libraries such as BBCSO or VSL et al.

(Because Dorico 4 will include native coding for the new generation of processors, this will undoubtedly improve performance but as a starting point, I am interested to know how things work today.)

Iirc, BBCSO 1.5 (due next week) will be M1 native. Then the test will be really interesting.

1 Like

My own experiments with a 16" M1 Pro with 16Gb of RAM, using SINE Player and Orchestral Tools’ Miroire sample library, show that it can handle an extraordinary amount of memory compression and swap usage with no performance penalty.

There are any number of Youtube videos showing 16Gb M1 Mac performing more or less identically to Macs with twice as much RAM.

16Gb of RAM does not mean ‘this machine can only hold 16 Gb of data at a time’.

1 Like

Very interesting! BBCSO has always been quite heavy library to use, but perhaps this will change then