Playback - Number of instruments

Dorico
1

Daniel,

You may have said this elsewhere, but at the moment, I cannot find it.

I am working on a project (rather large) in Sibelius 7.1.3, that I hope to really finish in Dorico upon its release. The issue I am having and getting very angry over, is that I have a score for a semi standard orchestra (31 staves - Flute I and Flute II on separate staves, etc.). Sibelius doesn’t playback correctly. It flat out ignores many staves, and plays partial staves of some instruments. And sometimes, it just decides to playback 1 instrument regardless of having nothing selected. I am sure that much of this is a Sound set issue, of which I am not willing to upgrade to get it fixed.

Will Dorico be able to handle playback of this number of instruments? Or more? I have a Mac Pro (after running into some money 2 years ago), that has a 12 core processor 64 GB RAM, etc. I have not put any music notation software on there yet, as I am waiting to install Dorico on there. But I am curious if I am going to run into similar issues regarding “too many instruments” when it comes to playback.

Robby

2

Yes, I would expect Dorico to be able to handle as many staves as you throw at it. Cubase is able to play back very large numbers of tracks, so provided your system has the resources to handle that kind of load, Dorico ought to perform roughly the same as Cubase. We don’t have any benchmarks or anything of the sort at this stage, but I would be surprised if Dorico were able to play back significantly fewer tracks than Cubase on comparable hardware.

3

I regularly use 72 staves (many hidden most of the time) Even Sibelius has no problem handling the playback. The only exception to this is if, on a busy page, there are multiple doublings of notes in Wind and Brass. Then there are occasional drop-outs. I get round this by making all the doublings silent.

4

If you’re currently using the iMAC with 4GB or RAM, then there’s your problem, not Sibelius.