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:
- 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.
- If I just simply switch to ‘Play’ mode, there’s also a long delay and the mouse whirls around (circle).
- 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.
- 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:
- ritardando on m. 96
- repeat symbol on m. 96
- arpeggio symbol on chord on m. 96
- ‘a tempo’ on m. 97
- 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.