MuseScore super slow

• Jan 21, 2014 - 23:45

Sometimes MuseScore becomes super slow with certain scores. What's going on? Basically whenever I enter notes or lyrics the CPU usage spikes and completely eats up one of my CPU scores and MuseScore has trouble keeping up. During playback everything is fine with CPU usage very low. These are the things I experience:

  • Lyrics: I can type out a full sentence and then have to wait 5-10 seconds before the words actually appear.
  • Notes: Instead of playing each note as I type, it sort of plays each note for its full length before going to the next one. And like with lyrics I can type out several notes quickly, but then have to wait for MuseScore to catch up while its slowly playing each note and placing them down.

Super annoying!! My score isn't even that big, just 37 KB, and it has happened with other scores as well, both small and large. I have tried the following:

  • Restart MuseScore
  • Change SoundFont to the smalles one
  • Turn off the navigator
  • Disable anti-aliased canvas drawing
  • Change I/O Portaudio from the default MME, Microsoft Sound Mapper - Output, to Windows DirectSound, Primary Sound Capture Device
  • Disable sound while editing

None has made any difference. What can I do?

Windows 8.1
MuseScore 1.3.r5702.


Comments

It's normal for large scores to be slow, but if you are having problems with a particular small score, then it is possibly something unique to that score, meaning you'd have to post it here for anyone to have a chance of duplicating the problem. Even if it is several scores, they might have something in common. Basically, if it doesn't happen with the demo score - or if there are *any* scores it doesn't happen for - then it makes sense to look at the specific scores you are having problems with. If it is literally *all* scores, then it's probably something going on with your particular system - so sure to check out Known incompatibilities . And try rebooting if you haven't already. Sounds like you've already checked a bunch of things that make sense to check, though.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I'm guessing it has to do with the size then, cause it usually happens after a little while of editing.

What I'm wondering though is why this is considered normal. I mean, aren't everyone annoyed with this? Are there any work being done to try to resolve this? Do the future MuseScore 2.0 have this problem, or is it fixed there?

In reply to by Svish

I don't think most people work on scores long enough to slow down that noticeably. It's got to be hundreds of measures before you see it slow down, right? I've got a score 500-some-odd messures, 6 staves, and it's a little sluggish, but still totally usable. Slowing down on "normal" length scores is not normal, which is why I suggested posting if you one that is small.

2.0 won't be any better, realistically, and could be worse when linked parts are involved. The main problem as I understand it is that every edit requires MuseScore to completely re-layout the entire score. That's an area ripe for optimization, but I don't think anyone plans to do that until after 2.0 is released.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Wow, that sounds terribly inefficient and definitely something that should be prioritized in my opinion.

My score is only around 100 measures and 6 staves, although the problem started to appear when I had typed out around 70-80 of them if I remember correctly. At the end it was just unbearable. Each note took around 2-3 seconds to get into the score, which is a lot slower than I am able to type. Being 5-10 notes in front of what you hear and see in the score is rather confusing and annoying, hehe.

Will see if I can find a score to attach when I get home tonight.

In reply to by Svish

Could you provide us with the file as Marc suggested? You can attach a file to a comment or simply put an external link to the file in the comment. This way we can try to reproduce the problem, investigate the source of the problem and create a fix for it.

In reply to by Thomas

I'm not allowed to share the score that made me post this, but I think I have some others with the same problem. I'll see if I can find a good example when i come home from work tonight and attach it here.

Your remark «Lyrics: I can type out a full sentence and then have to wait 5-10 seconds before the words actually appear. »
applies also to my mailer Thunderbird under Linux Mint16

So: is, on your computer, this slowing specific to mscore ?

In reply to by robert leleu

I don't experience this anywhere else no. And if I do it's usually just for a second and related to something else taking up too much resources. For MuseScore it doesn't seem to matter what else is happening on my machine and it never ends once it has started for a particular score.

Here are two examples of what I'm talking about:

Hope it can help with debugging and fixing this. Love MuseScore and really can't complain about much, but this performance thing is kind of a big thorn.

In reply to by Svish

I can confirm Gloria is ridiculously slow. The other one isn't obviously slower than normal on my system, although this could be a difference in CPU or GPU speed.

Regarding Gloria, it was easy enough to see what was going, but this won't help you: it's the lyrics. My 500+ measure score is much more responsive than this, but it's instrumental. So on a hunch, I deleted all your lyrics (right click one, select all similar, delete - in case you didn't know). Instant 1000% improvement.

The other bad news is, it's slow in my 2.0 build even with the lyrics deleted. But it's a debug build, running under the debugger, which doesn't help, so I wouldn't panic yet.

Posting this on a few of the "slowness" threads because I am so pleased with the result I just encountered. I was having maddening problems with freezing/hanging/stalling -- the kind that would make me hate MuseScore and throw my laptop out the window. It would happen if I were to: move a note up or down, move across the score, try to play the score, do a save, or basically anything that involved editing or playing.

My conditions were similar to others: over 150 measures, roughly a dozen+ parts. It would happen even if I were to change computers, or save different versions of the files -- even, several times, starting a new file and pasting the parts in.

I've done the following. I don't know which gave me the best bang, but each seemed to help: turn off autosave, flip navigation from page view to continuous, remove all slurs (which MuseScore doesn't seem to play, anyway). Now MS responds to me.

p.s. I have never used the navigator. Didn't even know it was there until people suggested turning it off.

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