Playback starting with delay

Not sure if it’s a performance issue or a settings one, but when I click play, the green play cursor appears immediately, but it starts playing about a second later.
I would expect it to start playing immediately. Any suggestion for fixing it?

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Are you using NotePerformer? They mention there is a one second delay for NP to figure all the expression out and other stuff.

That’s right what Andro wrote, but even without NotePerformer you might experience that delay depending on the chosen buffer size of the audio driver. The bigger the buffer size, the longer the delay.
You can check your audio buffer size if you go to Edit > Device Setup and then push the Device Control Panel button. Then a device depending window opens where you can see and in most cases set the buffer size.

I’m using HALion Sonic SE for playback. (The one that came by default).
My device buffer size is pretty low:
image
I’m also able to play my keyboard live, the delay is only when starting playback.
I’ve also looked for count-in settings (Changing the count-in duration) but that didn’t change anything.

Any other idea?

Well, you also have to give Dorico a little time to prepare for the playback, because all the playback structures do get generated on the fly.

If that’s a technological limitaion, I feel like it can be solved. DAWs like Cubase has no such delay… they play immidiately.
I feel like this is important to my experience working wita Dorico.

CPU capability? SSD or drive speed?

And pardon me asking, no offence intended, but since Dorico is an engraving program, why does this really matter? Are you attempting to use it as a live performance tool?

What I’m saying is I don’t think it’s a technological limitation on my side, but (probably) an engineering issue that should be solve on their side. As I have no such issues with other programs with much more complicated playing capability (more instruments effects etc).

The reason I care, is that I very often play various segments of my music to make sure I notated them right. Because I do that a lot and for short periods of the music, having to wait for playing every time damages my working speed and frankly just makes the whole working experience not so great.

Am I the only one that encounters this? Does it work smoothly for other people?

Dorico will always take a moment to prepare for playback. Technologically a music notation application is very different to a sequencer. In a sequencer, all of the events to be played are known at all times, but music notation software has to translate the written notation into appropriate MIDI instructions that take into account things like generating notes for trills and tremolos, harmonics, and so on. Dorico tries to keep these calculations up-to-date as you edit the project, but if you are editing the music, it will need to at least recalculate the playback data for the instrument(s) whose music you have edited since you last played back, and although this is typically performed very quickly, it is not instantaneous.

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According to what you’re saying, it should play without delay if I haven’t made any edits in the score. Unfortunately this is not the case. Maybe this is a different issue?
Here’s a gif demonstrating the issue:
Dorico playback
The green cursor appear immediately, then it hangs there for a second before starting to move and play. This happens even if I’m doing it for the same section of music over and over again without making any edits.
Is this the expected behavior? Or is it just for me?

It is the expected behaviour, yes. Even when nothing needs to be recalculated, it still takes a moment for playback to begin.