Here in holland the 5800x and 5600x are available , just bought one 
5900x is more difficult to find
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I’m jealous! I’ve been looking for a 5950x in the US but they are virtually impossible to find without paying 150% of the retail price.
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In order to be able to help you, @Gareth_Glyn , we need to know what you use your computer for.
It doesn’t take terribly much video editing to fill up a 1TB hard drive, but you’re unlikely to use anywhere near that level of storage (let alone twice that level of storage) if all your computer use is music notation-based and you’re only running stock HALion (and perhaps NotePerformer) sound libraries.
So, what do you use your computer for?
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Prefacing my reply with a Blackadder quote ‘I am one of these people who are quite happy to wear cotton, but have no idea how it works’, I have what I suppose is a rather non-standard setup. I have been happy to stick with Windows 7 on my ‘other’ computer, on which I run Sibelius 6 (with which version I’m also happy) - this is an HPxw4400 Workstation with - and I quote - “Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.40GB, 8.00GB RAM, with an extra internal 931 GB HD with 8.00GB free”. (This disk contains large files associated with East-West sound libraries.)
The HP is networked to the ThinkCentre I mentioned, which I bought solely (originally) to run Dorico - requiring, as it does, Windows 10. And that, apart from word-processing, email and Movavi, is all I really do with the machine. However, the computer running Windows 7 is showing signs of failure, and my intention is eventually to move everything from it, together with whatever’s on the ThinkCentre, to the not-yet-bought new computer - and (if my maths are correct) that means 321GB of stuff from the C: drive and - unless the internal HD can be installed in the new computer - all the East West libraries mentioned. I’m only hoping that I can successfully move my Sibelius v6 to the new machine, including all the updates which I must have applied to it since upgrading from previous versions; otherwise I suppose I’d have to keep the ageing HP. It seems that the original computer contains 23 GB of documents, 25GB of images, 92GB of music, 41GB of video and 2GB of other stuff including plugins etc.
The new computer, then, would have to do everything from Dorico to video and sound editing (Nero), sequencing, photo editing (Photoshop), Zoom meetings and a whole lot of other things, most of which probably don’t use much memory or a lot of disk space (but that’s just me guessing). I feel it’s important that the specs of the new computer should be future-proof to some extent, assuming that the requirements for new programs and upgrades will increase as time goes on.
Rest assured I’ll pass on all advice from this thread to my computer builder, my expertise in these matters being next to nil: my main goal of course is to ensure that large scores in Dorico can be processed as quickly and smoothly as is possible.
I don’t think I’ve seen you mention an audio interface or DAC. Do you have one? Planning on buying one? Or do you use a soundcard or motherboard audio?
It’s probably not relevant, but mentioning it because there are only a couple of motherboards for AMD builds that support Thunderbolt. If you have or think you might buy a Thunderbolt interface (like Universal Audio, MOTU, Apogee, etc) you’ll need to confirm the mobo has support for it. I have a couple of UAD devices and always have my Thunderbolt 3 UAD Satellite attached to my desktop for Pro Tools stuff. Most mobos for Intel builds will support it fine, although you may need to buy an inexpensive Thunderbolt card like the Gigabyte Alpine Ridge. If you are only planning on using USB audio devices (or internal) then it probably doesn’t matter.
It must be said that I haven’t kept up with developments in sound technology, so much of the terminology is beyond me, but I’ll certainly pass your remarks on. All I can say is that the ‘original’ computer (the one running Windows 7) uses a Scarlett 18i8 outboard interface, which works excellently, and whatever the ThinkCentre uses is internal and also works perfectly well. More than that, regrettably, I can’t say! (When I started composing professionally, our technology was pencil, indian ink and manuscript paper!)
Your scarlett will continue to do fine. That’s a very nice interface. (Assuming the drivers can be updated to your new machine, that is. I have a Saffire pro 40 and it is aging out on me…)
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Returning to the issue in general, even if I get the very best system for the purpose, what order of speed might I expect for the slowest operations? At the moment, with a vocal score comprising piano and about 20 voices (and blank staves for the upcoming chamber orchestra lines) in 15 flows, each operation in Setup mode (e.g. creating a new player, moving a stave to the desired place in score order) is taking 3-4 minutes, sometimes longer. Changing from Play to Engrave, and/or from Galley to Page took similar times to complete until I read Daniel’s excellent tip (in another thread) to open separate windows. What kind of improvement can I expect if I really beef up the system as suggested in posts above?
Obviously it’s all the music calculations that take the most time, so if you want to post a file, I’m sure some of us would be happy to test. If you can’t post the file, I just did a test on an empty file.
20 voices, Piano, String Section, 15 flows, 100 bars each like below:
I have several audio programs at once, VSL Playback Template loaded, and my system is a few years old, but switching is still fast. Checking the application.log file in AppData/Roaming/Steinberg/Dorico3.5 shows it took 1051 ms (1.051 seconds) to switch from Engrave to Play. Galley to Page was 1153 ms. I’m using an Intel i9-9900k CPU with 64 GB RAM.
Obviously it would be a lot slower if Dorico had extensive music calculations to do, but curious if you are experiencing slow downs on an empty file too.
Thanks for going to so much trouble on my account - greatly appreciated. There’s so much difference in calculation times between your tests and my experience, so I’d be happy to post the file as soon as I can. I’m interested too in the application.log file idea - how do I run that on my project?
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In an Explorer window (assuming that’s what Windows calls the file browser) navigate to %appdata%\Steinberg\ Dorico 3.5
In addition to various files that hold your saved defaults, you’ll find a bunch of numbered application.log files. The one with no number details your most recent Dorico use.
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I like the sound of 64 GB of RAM - certainly puts my 4 into perspective! That goes on my list for the builder.
In general operations in Setup mode are among the slowest that Dorico performs because they typically require that Dorico recalculate all of the music again from scratch. Things like reordering flows, adding new flows, adding or removing players from flows, etc., will be slower than is ideal, even on a fast computer with lots of RAM.
You can mitigate some of this by doing flow-related operations via File > Project Info (e.g. adding flows or reordering them, etc.), which allows you to batch up several changes and perform them all together when you click Apply, rather than waiting for each one to complete before you start the next.
Other operations in Setup mode may be faster if you switch to looking at a part layout rather than a full score layout, and if you ensure that you have only a single window open onto your project, and only a single layout open in that window (i.e. make sure you only have a single tab showing). Dorico will still have to recalculate everything, but the part you’re looking at will be much quicker to recalculate than the full score, so you can again only take the hit of the full score being recalculated from scratch by only switching back to the full score after you’ve done all of the Setup mode operations you need to do.
We do certainly plan to improve the performance of these operations in Setup mode in future versions, though it’s complicated to do so, and it will inevitably always be somewhat slow simply due to the fact that the changes you make there are global and have far-reaching effects on the whole project.
Would it be possible in the future to do this in Setup Mode?
- Add a flow
- Grey out the music or something, or a message that says “recalculation will happen after you exit Setup”
Or maybe just a setting that would ignore recalculation in Setup mode until you go to another mode.
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What a matchless forum this is. The Project Info route is one that I very much forward to trying.
While I’m waiting for a new computer, I’m still trying to work with my very slow current one. I decided this morning to delete the remaining 13 flows which I haven’t yet tidied up after XML import, in order to re-export them from Sibelius after certain tweaks. I used Project Info to delete the flows, and I pressed ‘Apply’ about 25 minutes ago. The wheel is still spinning, and the ‘not responding’ message comes and goes. Is it likely to complete, or might I have created an endless loop? I don’t want to cancel (if, indeed, that’s possible) and by so doing corrupting the whole project.
It’s quite likely you’ve created an endless loop. To be absolutely sure your stuff’s safe (and this is the belt and braces approach) open an Explorer window and navigate to the AutoSave folder - it’s in %appdata%\Steinberg\Dorico 3.5. Copy and paste the most recent files in there somewhere safe before ending the Dorico process from Task Manager.
When you launch Dorico again, the chances are that it’ll ask you whether you want to recover your autosaved projects (you do!). I’m just offering you a third bite of the cherry; the second being that when Dorico clears the AutoSave folder it does so to the Recycle Bin rather than entirely deleting the files.
You may find that File > Export > Flows is a more efficient way to split the file up. It’ll spit out one new Dorico project per flow.
Your advice was very valuable, @pianoleo, given that the wheel was still spinning two hours later! I’ve now done what you suggested in your first two paragraphs. Otherwise, just to confirm - I was trying to delete the eight flows (not 13 as I’d mistakenly said earlier) completely as I had no further use for them (my idea is to create eight new ones from Sibelius and import them). I was able to do this surprisingly quickly (a few seconds!) from the Flows panel in Setup.
Now with only seven flows left, everything is working very rapidly, so I’m tempted to import each remaining flow as a project, work on each one and then join everything together.
I now know, though, that when I do that I shall be prompted to choose between ‘all new’ and ‘merge if possible’, and in my limited experience I think I’ll go for ‘all new’ and combine the duplicate players later, because in another thread I describe how Dorico reallocates musical material rather unexpectedly and randomly with the merge option.
I’m also toying with the idea of just copy-pasting each new flow to the end of the previous one and then split the whole file into flows afterwards. It’ll be a learning experience if nothing else.
Hi @fredgunn -
I tried to post a zipped file, but it’s too big (it’s 5115KB, hardly smaller than the .dorico file). How do I manage it? Would a Dropbox link be acceptable under forum terms?
I’m not sure what the forum limit is, but you could always cut the file size down by deleting a few flows. I’m sure it would still be an interesting comparison even if it isn’t the full file.