Dear colleagues of Dorico, I would like to know your opinion regarding the best configuration for a non-intensive use of Dorico. Personally, I own a Mac mini M2 with 16 gigabytes of ram and 512 ssd, yet I don’t think it’s that fast, especially when compared to MuseScore, which is definitely superior in speed, but lower for all the reasons you can imagine and that led me to choose Dorico. I specify that I was thinking either of the new Mac mini or even the Mac studio. What would you do and/or what would you use to support Dorico? Thank you
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There was a thread a few months ago right after the release of the new M4 line which you may find interesting:
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How large are your scores? It’s certainly true that Dorico performs a lot more calculations than other notation software, and it can get slower with very large projects. The speed may not be a limitation caused by your hardware.
There is a thread posting benchmarks of Dorico activity on different computers, and I think the M4 was a bit faster than the earlier Apple Silicon Macs, but not that much faster.
Also, when Dorico auto-saves your document, there is often a slow-down – particularly if there is a lot of VST data to save.
Personally, I have an M1 Pro and M2 Pro, and I find both of them perfectly responsive, even in largish documents, e.g. 30 Players, 20 Flows. I do have one document with over 600 Flows (just piano), and that did start to get a bit slow…
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I used a M1 Max and now a M3 Max : never had CPU issue when scoring. but when exporting Audio with many instruments it can becomes CPU intensive especially if you are using physical modeling VST such as SWAM. RAM however is an issue if you are using VST wuth huge sample libraries. For instance BBC SO with the dedicated Noteperformer engine requires almost 96GB of RAM to work. I have now 128Gb of RAM on my M3 Max but because I use a huge playback template.
The bigger your scores get, the more calculations will be needed and performed. The problem is, with Dorico but also with Sibelius and so many other programs, that the operations need to happen in a certain order, limiting the advantage of having many CPU cores.
What would help is the single CPU-core speed and—but I may be wrong—M3 and especially M4 cores are significantly faster than their predecessors.
I have an M3 Max and a CPU monitor in the menu bar: regardless of score size, Dorico seldom uses significant CPU power. The only times when I see the multi-core power come into play is when I edit the Project Info or in Setup mode since, possibly, Dorico can line up more processes to happen at the same time.
Condensed scores will always be much slower but there is something you can do here: open a second window of the project in a different mode (Write>Engrave) or in a different view (Galley>Page) and just switch between windows. This will counter most slowing-down events.
Let us know about your specific needs and we’ll gladly help you.
Thank you all for the answers, the advice is always valuable. I will try to try the machines I mentioned to understand if there will actually be advantages compared to my current one. Good music!
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