Speaking of education, I’d like to offer some advice. I’m taking an online composition course. My teacher uses Dorico to demonstrate in class. He often has to switch between different scores, but in the process, the software often fails to play properly to produce sound. Then he has to restart every instance of Dorico that he opens. This is not only embarrassing but also a waste of time.
That doesn’t sound like normal behaviour, so the embarrassment should be the teacher’s!
Dorico has to load in the sounds for each project when you switch between them (if you want playback – you can just turn it off); but if he’s using lightweight samples like Noteperformer or HSO, then this shouldn’t take long, and certainly shouldn’t be incomplete.
Certainly you can play back multiple projects within the same Dorico session, but only one project can be active for playback at any time. As Ben says, you have to wait a few seconds after switching between projects for the sounds for the newly-activated project to be loaded, but this is handled. Please advise your teacher that if he is having problems with this, he should contact us for support, and we will be pleased to assist him.
OK, I’ll tell my teacher. I just think that since you have the ability to open multiple scores at the same time and switch between them, it’s best to avoid the problems that arise from it as much as possible. If users need to be very careful to avoid problems, then the experience is really not good.
As said, users don’t need to be very careful. You just need to wait for the green light before pressing Play. If there are other problems, then your teacher needs lessons!
I think your reply is not helping the Dorico team, but hurting them, because your comments will make others unwilling to give feedback and suggestions in the forum in the future.
In general, there are no problems with opening multiple projects and playing them back. You do need to wait for the “power button” on the toolbar to light up, indicating that the plug-ins and sounds have finished loading and the project is ready to play back, but otherwise it should be very solid. We would be pleased to provide whatever support your teacher might need.
OK, I’ll pass that on. Most of the time it’s normal to wait for the green light to come on after switching over, but sometimes, the green light won’t come on even after waiting for a long time, and the software will freeze. This is not uncommon, and requires restarting all open instances of Dorico.
Actually, this is what happens to me as well, when I try to switch between big projects, that Dorico is suddenly closing down and I have to restart the computer, that everything is back to normal. Therefore I try to avoid switching back and forth as much as I can.
I never tried to find a reproducible case, but this sounds familiar to me …
It doesn’t sound as if the teacher here is experiencing crashes, but rather that he is unable to play back the newly-activated project. If you are experiencing crashes when switching between projects, please do Help > Create Diagnostic Report the next time it happens and attach the diagnostics here so that we can investigate.
If the sound does not come out normally after switching and the green light does not light up, a crash will occur.
If your teacher is experiencing crashes, then again, we can only really offer any meaningful assistance if we have the crash logs, so please ask him to do Help > Create Diagnostic Report after restarting Dorico following the crash, and then send the diagnostics to us. He can email them to me directly at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de.
OK, I’ve told him.
@Dongww, as he is a Dorico user, I would strongly encourage your teacher to become a registered forum user in order to be able to come here directly for help. The Dorico team and we fellow users would be able to assist him more efficiently that way (and, as a bonus, it would relieve you from having to be in the middle of it).
I (and many others) have found it to be an incredibly valuable resource, as your teacher no doubt would also.
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It’s sad to say, but I have this same issue when using the program with multiple projects open. I don’t do it, nor have I removed the playback library from one of the projects. I have tons of Finale material that I want to convert into Dorico; It’s a prolonged process
- Playback is irrelevant to conversion from Finale to Dorico. That’s the beauty of MusicXML.
- I can’t see a need to have multiple projects open to do this.
(Welcome to the forum)
Hi @William_Woodward
Maybe this post can be also helpful for you (?)
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If you’re opening multiple files as part of some XML batch processing, you can always turn off audio activation while you’re doing that; and then turn it back on when you want to work individually with each file.
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The XML makes the scores weird? Also, there are times I’m rearranging the chart, and I want to cut and paste music from the Finale score into a fresh Dorico score
Maybe open the xml in a separate, unactivated window, and then copy and paste into a window with a new project?