Crackly playback and Save to Score

• Oct 5, 2020 - 00:14

Sometimes playback is crackly. I think it's worse the first time I play a score. I'm guessing it crackles because the soundFont is loading from the hard disk (well, it's an SSD, actually), but I'm not certain. I'm on a new-ish MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM. I've tried closing un-needed programs, to free up as much RAM as possible. Not sure if that is helping.

Help me understand what's going on, and anything I can do to make playback work better.

I wondered if view: synthesizer: Save to score would help. I don't think it did. Now, I have to admit I don't know what "save to score" does. Can someone explain that, please?


Comments

If it crackles the first time and improves afterward, it's probably related to MuseScore doing some page swapping to load the playback code into active memory. There are people with more knowledge about this than me, but unless you're going to upgrade you computer just expect to have the crackling the first time and improvement after that.

What Save to score does is save the soundfonts and synthesizer settings to the current score. When you load the score later, you have the option of clicking load from score to restore the synthesizer and soundfonts to those same settings. This is useful because the synthesizer can only have one set of settings that does not automatically change because you load or create a different score.

In reply to by mike320

Thanks!

I still don't get "save to score." I tried to find an explanation in the manual, but came up mostly empty.

If I "save to score," quit the score, and then open it later, does the SoundFont saved to the score load into memory at the same time as the score does? If it does, will that help with crackling on first playback?

Or do I still have to load the soundfont from the score?

What am I saving exactly when I "save to score"? Am I saving soundfonts, or maybe just soundfont settings, or synthesizer settings?

I'm not being clear. (This is hard!) Let me try asking a different way. Is "save to score" primarily intended to make it more convenient to swap settings and soundfonts from one machine or user to another?

Maybe you could give an example of a typical use of "save to score"?

Thanks again

In reply to by Timborino

Save to score is a convenient way to set the sound fonts in the same order and synthesizer settings so you can restore them later on a different machine (if they have the same sound fonts) or on your own machine because it takes so long to reorder the sound fonts. This is important because if you expect the MuseScore General HQ sounds to make your score sound right and you haven't changed anything in the mixer you will be happy. If you put Sontina Symphony Orchestra as the first sound fonts when you load the score later, you will get the sounds from that sound font instead. This might not make you happy. If you save to score then open it later you can then load from score in the synthesizer to put the sounds back in the same order. This is a typical use of save to score.

This will not affect the crackle at all unless the sound font you are using is the cause of the crackle, which is not impossible but not likely though a smaller sound font might improve the situation some.

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