audio engine process died message

Hello,

Dorico stopped responding while I was using it so I force quit it. Now Dorico doesn’t start but leaves the message audio VST engine stopped working, then “audio engine process died” message shows up. Would someone help me with this situation?

I searched the forum and found several related posts, but nothing solved the problem so far.
I tried:
-restarting the computer
-make sure dorico is the newest version with valid licence
-running “cleanup_prefs_and_engine” batch file
-make sure all windows update is installed (including Windows6.1-KB2670838-x64 update. I’m using windows 7 SP1)

I made a crash dump, following the FAQ thread, which I uploaded to following link.

I hope there’s some way to revive dorico…

Sure there is hope to get you going again, just not immediately.
I don’t have a debugger here at home, so I can take a look at the crash dump tomorrow when I’m back to the office.

What would be also helpful, if you zip up the folder
C:\Users<yourname>\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\VSTAudioEngine_64
and send it to ‘u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de’.
That also gives me some logs of the audio engine rather than Dorico.

Dear Ulf,

Thank you very much!
I just sent the zip file to your email address.

Your crash dump looks exactly same to other dumps we got before and where the KB2670838-x64 update did the trick to make it work again.
So I’m kindly asking you to reinstall or repair that Windows updater.

With Ulf’s help, my Dorico started working again. It turned out that changing desktop theme to Windows Classic theme affected Dorico.
I downloaded the windows update patch yesterday and tried to run it, but it returned “this is already installed to your computer”. So it should be installed to my computer. I don’t know what issue the patch is dealing, but changing theme might have reverted some windows patches. By turning desktop theme to the default one, the problem ceased.

Thank you Ulf again for your help!

What could possibly be the reason for my getting the ‘audio engine process died’ message 5 years later? Just installed and activated D5.
Win 11, medion computer “intel pentium silver”.
D4 starts alright.

There could be several reasons. Could you please do from the menu Help > Create Diagnostics Report and post the corresponding zip file here? Thanks

Hello Ulf,

Thanks for replying so quickly.
Problem is meanwhile solved after updating several Steinberg components (including media bay).

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