I have saved a spindump from Activity Monitor taken while Dorico was alternating between spinning beachball and spinning beachball + Dorico unresponsive. I can’t upload the text file because the upload function here grays out text files. I have created a pdf of the spindump but it is too large to upload. Note that this particular spin dump happened while I was trying to quit Dorico, but it happens during my normal work as well. I originally tried pasting the text of the spin dump here but it is too many characters. I am on a 2023 Mac Studio with an M2 Max.
I will try in the comments to include half of the spindump text in one comment and the last half of the spindump in a second comment.
I am transferring a musical from Finale to Dorico. It has a lot of players, split between 15 vocalists and the orchestra. The five percussion players hold a lot of instruments in their percussion kits. There are four instances of the ARIA multi for sound output. I started having problems a few songs ago but now, at the 13th song, Dorico has become unusable. I suppose I will need to split it into multiple projects, but I was hoping to get through at least through the first Act before having to do that.
Note that (given past experience with PrevisPro and Final Cut Pro) I deleted the CoreSpotlight metadata folder and went into recovery mode to use Disk Utility First Aid to repair all of the partitions on my internal drive. That didn’t help this Dorico problem.
If there is a better approach, please let me know. I am even willing to go out and get a new MacStudio Ultra with maxed out memory if I have to.
I think step one would be to upload your Dorico diagnostics (Help>Create Diagnostic report). It contains data on earlier behaviour, so just start Dorico and create the report from the hub.
(The spinning is gone now) I managed to mess up the song I was working on badly enough so that I had to delete the flow and reimport the mxl file. Being cautious I scrolled through looking for anything I might find that was odd. What I came across was a 4/4 measure that had five beats. Not only that, the extra beat, inserted at the end of the measure, does not show in Finale or in the score pdf of that song made from Finale. I did look in the mxl file to see if I could find anything at that measure, but I did not work my way through all of the instances of that measure for every staff and possibly every layer on each staff.
Back to Dorico, I managed to fix it and move all of the following music to the left one beat, but that messed later parts of the song where there were changes to 2/4 for one measure followed by two measures of 4/4 then another measure of 2/4 followed by two measures of 4/4 and so on, with a key change at each 2/4 measure. Of course, after I shifted all of the music the time signature and key signature changes were all off by a beat, so I had to manually fix those. What seems remarkable is that I wasn’t getting spinning beachballs while I did this. But------it may just be that deleting the CoreSpotlight metadata file did fix it, but I didn’t wait long enough to allow it to regenerate its metadata and the computer was busy with that, thus leaving me with spinning beachballs until I had been gone for several hours and it had time to do its thing.
The spinning beachball is back this morning, even with a project with only one flow in it (built from a project template based on my full musical project). I am attaching a spindump taken just now.
Dorico is basically not usable in this state. I don’t understand why it went from responsive last night with my main project that has 13 flows so far to spinning beachballs that take minutes this morning after every single click.
I did get a dialog early this morning asking for Dorico (forget the name) to be granted access to external drives. I don’t understand why as I haven’t put any sound files or anything for Dorico on an external drive.
Hi @Gregg_Butterfield , sorry for taking such a long time to respond on this.
Actually, from the data we are seeing that you have a massive playback setup. Your project uses 130 instances of VSTinstrument plug-ins, most of them are Aria and GrooveAgent instances. Because all of them have multiple outputs that haven an own channel in the Dorico mixer, you end up with a mixer with around 2700 channels (in the analogue world that would be a mixing console with over 100 meters in width). But also in the digital world this is massive and so no wonder that also Dorico struggles here with the workload of managing, audio processing, updating the GUI and so on.
We propose that you make a copy of your project and then apply the Silence template to get rid of all plug-in instances for a start and then apply a template that only uses HALion Sonic and GrooveAgent. That should reset everything and load only the minimum required amount of instrument instances. When you work with that project then, do you still get frequently the spinning beachball, or if at all?
Additionally, could you maybe provide us your project in it’s current state (with that 2700 channels)? We promise that we only use it in-house for analysing and testing purpose. If it is okay, please send to u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de
I can prepare the project and send it. The copyrights are registered for all of the songs. My concern, however, is AI data collection. I don’t want it to inadvertently get pulled into any AI’s training database. I started work on this musical in 1987 on Finale version 1.
Does Dorico clean up VST instances as they are deleted? As I am transferring music from Finale and Dorico does not recognize many of my players/instruments, it creates new instances of instruments and each of those has a corresponding new VST. Once I move the music to my instruments I delete the newly created player/instruments and their associated VSTs. The only VSTs I want in my project are the four instances of the ARIA multi that I have set up myself.
The instruments that typically can’t find a match when I import a Finale mxl file are:
French Horns (which seems odd as the other wind instruments and strings are matched)
Unpitched Percussion (This is because I have individual players and not percussion sections. Note that I have a lot of percussion. Three unpitched percussion players that hold large percussion kits plus one of the two pitched percussion players also holds a percussion kit with a number of instruments)
There are a few other instruments that don’t appear in many songs that may not be matched, but I can’t recall exactly which instruments they are.
I have experimented with adding three or four percussion section players, setting them up with the same percussion kits I use with my individual players and set output to one of my existing ARIA multis. This is something I just started trying a day or two ago. The initial result is not ideal. Previously, the import resulted in new percussion section players and, for the most part, the notes were in the right place on the five line staff and had the correct noteheads, even if the instruments associated with the notes were often wrong. When I import with the percussion section players already in place, the import process does match them and place the music in them, but the notes end up in the wrong place on the staff with wrong note heads. Plus, I believe that the import is actually altering the existing percussion kits of these section players. I’ll have to check that. At any rate, doing it this way may prevent the creation of so many VST instances, even though it will make moving the music to my individual players more difficult.
One of the things on my To Do list after moving the score to Dorico is to start seeing if I can trim the percussion while still keeping the sound I want.
I will start preparing the project to send to you.
Hi Gregg, you can also strip down the project to only a few bars, because we are only interested in seeing the playback setup with all the instruments and plug-ins.