I can’t get the (licensed) version of Dorico Pro 3.5 to start (on my Mac running OS X 10.14.6)
Most of the time it gets stuck with a message “Attached to Audio Engine” (see first image). Occasionally, if I Force Quit and restart it, it will display “Initializing Playback Controller” and then get stuck there.
Nothing to indicate what’s going on, etc.
Could you please have a look in the Console application for crash dumps of the VSTAudioEngine ? If there are, please zip them up and post here. Thanks.
Also, is there behind the Dorico splash screen maybe some dialog box hidden. Sometimes plug-ins throw these dialogs and then wait for a prompt, which stops the whole launch process. So please check.
Not sure if this is what happens to you, but sometimes when Dorico crashes, the separate audio engine process can get stuck in the background. This prevents Dorico from launching, so you need to kill the audio engine process manually from the activity monitor before launching Dorico.
VSTAudioEngine3.txt.zip (3.2 KB)
The Dorico splashscreen can’t be moved so no way to really know if there’s something behind it (unless of course it’s bigger than the splashscreen!). It is the case that if I click on something else, the Dorico splashscreen goes away (why?) but I can’t tell if any hidden dialog (owned by Dorico) goes away at all.
As an aside, I’m deeply familiar with this issue as we ran into it a few years ago with our own plugin host (Gig Performer). We made our splash-screen dragable specifically so one could see if there was some plugin dialog behind it. You might want to consider doing the same thing.
By the way I just Force Quit and tried again and this time I got a new error message (see image)
What’s its name? If it’s the VSTAudioEngine3 then it goes away when I Force Quit Dorico
Yes that’s the one. Usually if you get “Audio engine: waiting for connection,” it means the VST engine is still running and has to be manually killed. in Windows Task Manager, I find it’s further down in the detailed list. Not sure about Macs.
OK but that process did go away when I ForceQuit Dorico itself.
Try restarting the computer. Then you know the Audio Engine has been reset.
We need the logs from your computer, so please zip up the folders
~/Library/Preferences/Dorico 3.5 AudioEngine
~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 3.5
and attach here. Thanks.
OK - with the help of one of our own plugin analyser tools I figured out the problem.
Turns out that Dorico was waiting for a plugin from Softube to activate but the dialog for that plugin did not show up (it’s bigger than the splashscreen so it wouldn’t have been hidden) so the process was just stuck.
I removed that plugin from my system and then Dorico 3.5 immediately started up properly.
I thank you all for your suggestions and appreciate the quick response times.
Excellent, I’m glad to hear.
