Restart of audio and MIDI devices at every opening of Musescore to avoid latency of sounds

• Mar 26, 2021 - 15:17

Since, as far as I can remember, the 3.x updates of Musescore, I am tormented by a very significant delay between hitting the play button and the actual hearing of sounds - about 6 seconds. And I found out that, by restarting (every time I open Musescore) the "audio and MIDI devices" in Preferences - I/O, I can circumvent the problem. It's the first time after a decade or more I'm having this problem....why? Thanks for any help!
Enrico


Comments

More likely though, those first 6 seconds have passed by the time you reached and pressed that button.
Because I'm guessing that the delay is caused because the soundfont is still being loaded in the background and playback won't start until the soundfont(s) are loaded.

In reply to by jeetee

Thank you very much for replying. I don't think it's matter, as I think you're implying, of soundfonts loading: it never used to happen to me. I still don't understand why I have to restart the engine, which I guess is a every now and then resort.

In reply to by nosco

"It never used to happen"
but also
"ever since 3.x"

Since 3.x the default soundfont comes in the sf3 format, which is a compressed version compared to the sf2 version used in 2.x. Upon starting MuseScore, that sf3 compressed soundfont is decompressed into memory; which on my system indeed takes about 4-5 seconds.
A possible workaround is to download the sf2 version from the soundfonts handbook page and set that as the default soundfont instead of the sf3 one.

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