Hello there!
5 years into the future and I am facing a similar problem: My interface works fine until I press play and then all audio cuts out. I think I am going mad. Do you have any tips? I already rebooted my pc multiple times.
If you attach a Diagnostic Report, this will likely speed up any response to your question.
Hi @Lizardbrain , Derrek is right. Please load a project and then do from the menu Help > Create Diagnostics Report. The corresponding zip file post here, please. Thanks
(I’ve taken the liberty of moving this to a new thread since I suspect it is in fact unrelated to the old thread onto which this got tacked.)
Awesome thank you! The zip folder was too big to attach as is so here is a google drive link that should work Dorico Diagnostics.zip - Google Drive
Yesterday I could get it to work again for a bit by pressing the “reset audio engine data” button in preferences but now today it doesn’t work anymore again, even after resetting multiple times 
Thanks for the data @Lizardbrain .
Now, this is interesting. The diagnostics contain lots of crash files of the audio engine showing a crash in atio6axx.dll. That dll is part of an AMD graphics driver and is already very famous here as it would hang the scanning of NotePerformer, but that would prevent Dorico to start up at all.
Your case is different now, in that it passes the scanning but now crashes the audio engine at runtime.
Anyway, please have a look at this thread where you can find advice on how to update or revert your AMD driver.
Strange…
Another thing I learned is that the project that keeps crashing Dorico contains an instance of Pigments (VST software synth from Arturia) but other projects without other VST’s (outside of NotePerformer) don’t crash.
I also couldn’t open an Ableton Live project that contained an instance pigments so maybe that synth specifically clashes with the AMD driver
Another thing I noticed is that my generic AMD driver sounds very buggy with NotePerformer now but it sounds fine on ASIO4ALL as well as my audio interface, so that might be a processing power issue.
Thanks for the responsiveness, I’ll try reinstalling pigments and/or the main AMD driver
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It could well be in your case that Pigment is clashing with the AMD driver. In the debugger unfortunately I can’t see that because the callstack is incomplete and only shows atio6aax.dll but not from where that was called.
Hi Ulf! When opening the AMD software app I was faced with this error message which in my mind pretty much confirms that the AMD driver is the issue for both the NotePerformer buggy sound, the Dorico crash, and the pigments/ableton crashes.
I guess so, too.
Hi @Lizardbrain , it would be good to know which plugin is actually responsible for those crashes, whether it is NotePerformer or Pigment.
In order to rule out NotePerformer you could the following:
- Stop Dorico
- Create an empty file in the root of your C drive with the name np_use_software_rendering.txt
- Go to %appdata%\Steinberg\Dorico 4 AudioEngine_64 and delete the file Vst2xPlugin Infos Dorico 4 AudioEngine.xml in order to enforce a rescanning.
- Restart Dorico and use as usual
That text file in the root folder will notify NotePerformer not to use Open GL and therefore not call that atio6axx.dll. If you then still get crashes, then it must be Pigment that is calling atio6axx.dll.
Thank you very much
Tried a bunch of stuff today.
I reinstalled the AMD driver manually according to the link that was displayed in the previous error message. Now AMD Software does boot instead of getting the error message but the state of both Dorico and Ableton Live is the same strangely enough.
Regarding pigments and NotePerformer, now everytime I boot up Dorico I get the following message:
I have deleted the blacklist xml file to check if it was a fluke but I got the same error message again…
Now if I try to boot dorico it crashes at the following loading state:
When I boot pigments as a standalone synthesizer (outside of Dorico or Ableton Live) it works fine
After rebooting my pc Dorico did load so I made a diagnostics report:
Have you created that empty text file under C:\ ?
Because then NotePerformer shall not user OpenGL and cause those timeout issue.
Sorry, but you created a folder, not a file.
Please open NotePad and then do File > SaveAs and give that mentioned path/name
Ah sorry, I apparently have to change my permissions settings in order to save a file in my Windows C root folder, will this mess up anything?
Then do it this way: First create that file on your Desktop and then later move it to the root of your C drive by drag and drop. Then Windows will ask you for permission for that one file. You prompt okay and then you don’t need to mess with anything else. That way everything stays clean.
Ok I figured it out.
The AMD driver problem was a red herring of sorts. It was causing issues on my computer with the sound (as the NotePerformer sound was quite buggy) because there was an incorrect driver installed but the main cause behind the crash of both Dorico and Live was a faulty iteration of Pigments. An updated version of the VST was installed on a different file location but the old version (that was registered on Dorico and Ableton) was deactivated? or something? after the later version was installed. After I moved the current version of the vst into my standard VST folder both Ableton and Dorico worked on my interface and ASIO4all
This still doesn’t explain why NotePerformer was blacklisted at one point, or how to fix the AMD driver issues but at least I can keep going for now. Thanks for all your help Ulf! And sorry the solution ended up being so lame and straightforward, I am not the most technical soul.
I’m still not sure, if the pigment update is really the solution. I mean, there were plenty of crash files in that atio6axx.dll, I just could not see from where it got called.
Anyway, if your are fine for the moment, then we’ll leave it. But please come back if you run into trouble again.