Musescore slowing down

• Oct 5, 2018 - 00:36

I've been using musescore for a very long time, but I've never had this issue come up: My version of musescore has been extremely slow lately. I definitely don't think it's the computer itself, as I haven't even had it for a year yet, and it runs everything else at a completely normal pace. But, musescore seems to run way slower than everything else--sometimes I'll go to open the program and it will literally take 3-4 minutes for the program to open, and once I'm in it, it has an insane amount of lag, where things won't happen until 3-5 seconds after I do it. I'm more understanding of this second type of lag, I've seen it before, especially in larger scores/files. But, as of right now, my 50-measure SATB choir piece has the same amount of lag that my 8-minute long concert band score (along with all of its parts) used to have before any of this started happening. It just seems so strange, and I wanted to know if anyone has any insight. Should I try redownloading musescore?


Comments

3-4 minutes to open sounds like one of two things. Either a) you installed the MDL extension, which includes some soundfonts that do indeed take a long time to load, or b) you have MuseScore set to open an existing score that is huge. Or, on a related note, maybe c) you have a huge score in your your Recent Files lis that for whatever has no thumbnail, and MuseScore is taking a long time just to draw the thumbnail for the Start Center.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I don't believe that I have the MDL extension installed, and I usually open musescore by itself, without opening any other scores with it. My main issue is that it's slow and clunky while I'm in the program. I don't really know how else to explain it or how it got to be this way, other than that it just starting being excruciatingly slow to use.

In reply to by gmanhoffman

Well, first let's see if it is just a soundfont issue. Go to View / Synthesizer and check the contents of the Fluid and Zerberus tabs. If you have anything other than just MuseScore_General, that could be the culprit for the slow startup.

Even if you start MuseScore with no score, MuseScore still checks the recent score list to display the start center and populate File / Open Recent. If there are large scores that lack thumbnails (eg, they might have been created in 1.x, or they might have been saved in MSCX format rather than MSCZ), this could also affect startup. Try clearing that list to see if that helps.

If neither of those things improve startup time, it seems likely to be a resource / conflict issue unique to your system, so you might have to do some further investigation.

Once you've started the program, general responsiveness should be proportional to the size of the current score you are working on. Entering notes into a new empty score with only 32 measure (eg, the default untitled score) should be instantaneous. Entering notes into 100-page orchestra score might take several seconds each. This isn't new; MuseScore has always been inefficient with large scores. 3.0 should address this to a large extent, although there is still work to be done there. A 50-measure SATB score should be very quick, but it's possible it somehow got "polluted" with thousands of invisible elements (people sometimes get into this situation copy/pasting slurs and hairpins, for example). Attaching the score would allow us to investigate.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I checked, and I actually did have the extra soundfonts, but removing them didn't fix the issue. Also, I do have some big scores that the startup menu has to load, but I'm not 100% how to clear this menu. I'm just confused, because everything else on my computer runs okay.

The score in question IS pretty dense--I've attached the score, if that'll help things.

Attachment Size
Incantation.mscz 43.13 KB

In reply to by gmanhoffman

I forgot to mention that after removing the soundfonts, you'll need to hit "Set as Default", otherwise they are gone gone for the current session but get loaded again. So no surprise it didn't fix the startup time issue. Try again :-)

As for your score, it's not that large (although way more than 50 measures - is the right file?)and doesn't present problems on my system. It's not as snappy as an empty score of course, but we're talking about editing delays measured in milliseconds, not seconds.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I tried again, and this seemed to fix the start issue! The problem is that the program itself is still excruciatingly slow. And, that was the right file. (It was around 50 measures when that particular message was typed, haha.) I don't really know what else to try, if the issue is on my computer alone--I doubt any technician would have a working knowledge of musescore and would be able to diagnose it.

Also, as a little side note, is there any possible way that the file I just uploaded could be deleted from the forum? I just recently got a piece accepted for publication, so (albeit this may be wishful thinking,) I'm hoping to potentially have the same happen with this one. If that's not possible, that's fine--the piece isn't finished, anyway.

In reply to by gmanhoffman

Hard for me to imagine what the issue might be, then.

Congratulations on getting a piece published, BTW! As for deleting scores on the forum, it's not generally possible, nor is it anything one would normally need to worry about. If this is ever published., it's extremely unlikely having it here on a support forum would create any problems at all. Hardly anyone would read this far into the thread or be inclined to try downloading the piece for themselves except the few developers interested in helping diagnose the performance issues.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thank you very much! (Shameless self-advertising: It's called Where Will I Go, and it'll be published by Santa Barbara Music Publishing this upcoming January.) And yes, you're right, I suppose it is futile to worry about something like this, given this page's obscurity.

Also, I'm noticing that less developed scores are running normally--it's just that this one is running VERY slow. (Even slower than 200+ measure concert band scores that I've done.) So, I suppose that I'll deal with it for the time being.

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