Crashing when opening a recent project

I’ve attached the Diagnostic .zip file.

Basically, I can open any of the example files provided with the program, but I cannot open the file that I created last night. Whenever I attempt to open that file, the program just “unexpectedly quits.”

Please see attached - thank you!
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (622 KB)

Welcome to the forum, ajrobb, and I’m sorry that your first post is about a crashing problem! Can you attach the project that is crashing, or email it to me at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de?

I can see from the log files that you’re using the Boom audio device, which has caused problems for previous users (it creates an invalid device name). Could you try the following?

  • Run the Terminal app
  • Copy and paste the following:
    open ~/Library/Preferences/VSTAudioEngine2
  • This should open a Finder window. Delete the file Port Setup.xml
  • Start Dorico again

Unfortunately, deleting Port Setup.xml didn’t do the trick. I’ll try getting rid of Boom (I don’t even remember why I had it in the first place) and let you know if that works.

If you have files that you can’t open, you should be able to get them opening again by following these steps to delete the audio engine chunk from the file: File open stuck at 60% - Dorico - Steinberg Forums

Or if you’re not sure what you’re doing then by all means zip up the score and attach here and one of us can do it for you.

I was able to get it open by corrupting the audio engine portion of the file, though I wasn’t able to do it as-instructed in MacOS. While both Daniel and Paul were kind enough to offer to fix it themselves, there’s no fun in that :slight_smile:

The process detailed elsewhere on the site is:

    1. Make a duplicate of the problem Dorico file.
    1. Rename the duplicate from .dorico to .zip
    1. Open the .zip file
    1. Navigate to the audio engine part of the .zip file/folder and delete the whole directory
    1. Change .zip name back to .dorico
    1. Re-open in Dorico
    1. Success

I think this might be something more specific to Windows, or I just don’t know what I’m doing.

On a Mac, here’s what happened:

    1. Make a duplicate of the problem Dorico file.
    1. Rename the duplicate from .dorico to .zip
    1. Open the .zip file
    1. MacOS extracts the .zip file into a new folder
    1. Navigate to the audio engine part of the folder and delete the whole directory
    1. Re-compress the folder into a .zip file
    1. Change .zip to .dorico
    1. Re-open in Dorico
    1. Dorico says it’s the wrong kind of file

I also tried this:

    1. Make a duplicate of the problem Dorico file.
    1. Rename the duplicate from .dorico to .zip
    1. Open the .zip file
    1. MacOS extracts the .zip file into a new folder
    1. Navigate to the audio engine part of the folder and delete the whole directory
    1. Add a .dorico suffix to the folder
    1. MacOS is not fooled
    1. Can’t re-open in Dorico

I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to change the filetype from “folder” to “document” (I think I was somehow able to do this with a CLI tool back in 2003) but had no luck.

Finally, this is what I tried, and somehow it worked:

    1. Make a duplicate of the problem Dorico file.
    1. Open the duplicate file in VIM and navigate to the audio engine directory
    1. Hash out (or otherwise corrupt) important-looking lines of the audio engine file
    1. :wq
    1. :wq again
    1. Open the freshly-corrupted file in Dorico
    1. Unexpected success

Surely there must be an easier way to do this, right?

After you change .dorico to .zip, you have to actually unzip the archive, which will give you a folder containing the contents of the Dorico project bundle. In there is a folder called supplementary_data that includes the audio engine data. You delete the file enginedata from inside the vstaudioengine folder in supplementary_data, then select the two folders and two files in the root of the unzipped folder. This is the most crucial part of it: you can’t select the folder containing those two files and two folders, you must select those four items directly. Those items are:

META-INF folder
score.dtn file
scorelibrary.dtn file
supplementary_data folder

Select those four items, then right-click and choose Compress 4 Items (this is on Mac, of course). The resulting file will be called something like Archive.zip, and you can now rename it to e.g. recovered.dorico before opening it in Dorico again.

Daniel, I just followed your instructions and it worked perfectly! Thanks so much!

I didn’t realize that compressing from the 4 items individually would make the difference, but as I think about it, I get it - since the “.zip” would resolve to 4 items instead of resolving to a folder.

Thanks again!

Bonus points for completing the task in Vim. Level up.

If you’re happy on the command line then you could probably dogfish do this fixup with the ‘zip - d’ command

This has been happening to me ever since upgrading to Dorico 2, and I have been downloading all of the updates in the hope that this behavior would be fixed (I’ve gone back to using Dorico 1, which does not crash when opening recently-saved projects). Glad to hear I’m not the only one! So Boom is the problem, eh? I do find that utility useful for boosting the volume of things like videos, etc., so if I want to keep using Boom but also continue to use Dorico 2 (assuming that the programming team isn’t prioritizing a fix for this wonky interaction—which would be nice!), can I do the procedure mentioned above (uncompressing the Dorico file as a ZIP, taking out the audio engine data, etc.) and will that fix the files in question from now on? Or does it only fix a file temporarily until the next time that file is saved?

We have notified the maker of Boom about this issue and maybe they have brought out an update (don’t know but could be.)
Unfortunately, the issue will continue as long as you try and send the Dorico output to the Boom device.
If you use another audio interface/driver there shall be no problem.
So I suggest you try it out.