Piano Project Multiple Problems

Ok, I figured out what was wrong… If you have an ending repeat earlier in the piece and then add another one without a beginning repeat symbol, you will confuse Dorico majorly and of course it’s wrong! Read on if you want to see what I was doing and the symptoms.

And, as stable as Dorico is, I knew it had to be something I had done to screw it up!

My project was sailing along peacefully, productively until today. I periodically create a new version of my project file in case something like this happens, but would like not to have to copy/paste from the project that has problems to a copy of my last backup; that’s a hassle. The problems don’t occur in any of my other projects.

Summary of problems:

  1. From write mode in my piano piece, if I click ‘Play’, there is a long delay of about 10 to 20 seconds before playback starts.
  2. If I just simply switch to ‘Play’ mode, there’s also a long delay and the mouse whirls around (circle).
  3. If I click in the play timeline on the ‘Play’ tab, often times it won’t even respond and will fail to show a green cursor.
  4. When I look at task manager (Windows), it shows at least 1500 MB (1.5 GB) in RAM! This is just s simple piano project. It’s up to roughly 600 or 700 measures, but I thought Dorico could handle large projects? I don’t consider 600 or 700 measures large especially since there’s only two staves.

So, I created a copy of the project, called ‘Test’ and deleted everything from the beginning of my development section to the end of the sonata. The problem is still there. So, then I started simply clicking on the play cursor on the play tab on measures, starting at the beginning of the exposition, and when I got to measure 97, the cursor stopped activating (when I click on the measure in the play timeline, the play cursor refuses to show up.

At the change from measure 96 to 97, several things are happening:

  1. ritardando on m. 96
  2. repeat symbol on m. 96
  3. arpeggio symbol on chord on m. 96
  4. ‘a tempo’ on m. 97
  5. dynamic change from f to p

Am I trying to do too much and Dorico can’t handle it? The partial display of the material in mm. 97-100 was intentional.

image

Could you please do Help >Create Diagnostics Report and post the corresponding zip file here? And if possible that project file as well. If it is too sensitive, instead please send to ‘u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de’. Thanks

It sounds like all of the performance problems are indeed caused by an infinite repeat loop, which causes Dorico to do a lot more computation than it normally does. Normally the problem is an end repeat barline without a matching earlier start repeat barline. To speed things up while you figure out the problem, you can disable Play repeats on the Repeats page of Playback Options.