Dorico 3 always fails on my system in any file that's ever been connected to VE Pro

Thanks Dave, and interesting to see that a lot of options work for you that have never been practical for me for whatever reason. The short version is that I’ve already tried every configuration under the sun, and it doesn’t make a difference with regard to the issues I’m having with Dorico 3. More details below in case they might help in troubleshooting whatever’s happening.


Fratveno, I’m curious even though I’m not on Windows … the stuff you noted today was on Win7 and 8.1, but the stuff you mentioned on previous days applies to whatever the latest (supported) version of Windows is? So the problems you’ve noted occur with regularity on 7 and the latest version, but seem not occur at all on 8? Or am I misunderstanding?


Today I tried installing Dorico 3 on the iMac. For some reason this allowed me to connect more than one VEP instance (although, I stopped at only three instances when I usually need quite a few more than that; I could run more than a dozen on Dorico 2.2 without issue.) But when I tested the real issue, there was no improvement: trying to load that file after closing and restarting Dorico 3 = frozen Dorico. I should mention in case there’s any doubt: I haven’t simply been force quitting impatiently at the first sign of beachball this past month. Lately I force quit after sampling and spindumping, just because I already tested being patient on multiple occasions, and it didn’t make any difference with the issues I’m having. One time when Dorico 3 hung up trying to load a file, I left for an appointment and returned three hours later; Dorico was still rollin’ that beachball …

Not sure if it would be helpful to compare diagnostic reports from the iMac vs the Mac Pro. Have uploaded a few just in case: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NR2DX9K9vN3Gmr0CGsZDwhV2Vva48d2a


VEP settings details:

I always “leave one core free” for Dorico, and most of the time even an additional core for the OS (that based on a possibly-outdated recommendation I read somewhere awhile back.) I put that in quotes because there’s something I don’t quite get the wisdom of regarding VEP’s thread preferences: setting this preference seems to specify a minimum, but not a maximum. For instance, if I have only one instance up and tell it to default to one thread, Activity Monitor still shows the load being spread fairly evenly across all 12 threads (or in some cases, across all 6 physical cores; I still don’t know how programs like VEP and Dorico decide when to hyperthread vs when not to … or is it the processor itself that decides?)

For orchestral, I run everything decoupled and preserved. I’ve tried all variations and it doesn’t make a difference with regard to the issues I’m having in Dorico 3 described in this thread. On my system, even with a small orchestra and only one flow and no part layouts and all the other suggestions for keeping things snappy, Dorico (every version so far) runs quite slow if coupled. Decoupled, I can run a fairly large orchestra (quadruple woodwind or higher) with noticeable but livable slowdown. I’m a bit surprised that Dave can run coupled without a sizeable performance hit! For me that’s only a possibility with chamber music.

Regarding ports, most of the instruments I run have important components in the chain that don’t allow me to use ports. So in most projects, I’m on one port per instance. Again I’ve tried both ways in Dorico 3, and # of ports makes no difference to the issues I’m having.

I have of course tried the Event Input plugin as it was designed to be a workaround to allow ports, but even when only one instrument is playing (even when there’s only one instance with one instrument instantiated!), I always get stuck notes using Event Input.

Except in rare cases when a project requires more, I only do one stereo pair of in and out for each instance.


p.s. As an aside, I’ve heard that some pros in Hollywood use one VEP instance per articulation, and they claim their system performs the best that way … I’m really glad I’m not in that boat …

No, I don’t have any rig with Windows 10, so what I’ve said so far only refers to Windows 7. That rig has proven extremely stable during Dorico’s existence.
Only yesterday did I install Dorico on one of my VEPro slave machines, running W8.1, and there were no issues with VSTAudioengine not terminating normally.

UPDATE regarding Windows 7: It’s related to using VST3 versions of Vienna Products (same error when Synchron Player is loaded).
[ EDIT: VST3’s from other manufacturers are so far problem free… ]
D3 will terminate the VSTAudioengine normally as long as the VST2 version of VEPro is loaded.

D2.2.20 has no problems handling the VST3 plugins on the same W7 machine…

What sample players do you use? Maybe there is a particular player that is problematic.

Also how current are you SSD drives? I assume all your samples are SSD correct? What preload value do you use?

All my instruments are VI Pro 2 based except pianos. For pianos I use synchron or pianoteq. My preload size is 2K. My SSD is the single on-board 2TB SSD.

Regarding coupled vs uncoupled, this only matters at project load time. My load times are reasonably fast since my preload is 2K and I use load on midi activity only. All my projects work well with only 16GB of memory.

Also, I never understood the one instance per instrument issue. Has never been a problem for me. I think it has to do with Logic Pro and Kontakt instruments.

Hi Fratveno, thanks for the updates. Unfortunately here on Mac OS, the behavior I’m experiencing is the same regardless of whether I choose VST3 or VST2. By the way, how do you distinguish which is which when picking from the dropdown menu? On my system they get identical names in the dropdown, and the “About” section of the plugin doesn’t specify which VST version it is. (I can tell the difference if I load VEP using Bidule as a bridge, but that doesn’t help with the dropdown thing.)

(One weird thing I noticed … in Dorico 2 the animation in the “About” section of the plugin works as VSL presumably intended. But on Dorico 3, the animation doesn’t play … I can sort of step through it (if it were film or video, I’d describe it as skipping ~12 - 36 frames at a time) by selecting back and forth between the Dorico window and the plugin window.)

I’ve also been paying more attention since you started sharing your experience, and here on Mac OS, the failures aren’t as consistent as on your system. To elaborate: when trying to quit normally, sometimes Dorico 3 quits but VST Audio Engine is still running, sometimes VST Audio Engine closes, but Dorico hangs rather than quitting, occasionally they both quit normally, etc.

Thanks Dave, though I fear we may be getting off track into things that may not be relevant to the problems I’m having. So it doesn’t get lost, I’d like to reiterate that I’ve tried every configuration under the sun, and they all work in Dorico 2 and they all fail in Dorico 3.

Here are detailed replies for whatever they’re worth:

One of my SSD drives (Samsung 860 EVO) was just purchased and put into commission last Friday. Another (Sandisk Extreme II) is from a few years ago. I also sometimes run one library off the internal Apple PCIe SSD (which in theory can stream 3x faster than the others, but I’ve never noticed it make a difference in any side-by-side test I’ve run).

I use all the major sample players: VI Pro, Kontakt 6 (listed as compatible with Mojave, whereas K5 isn’t officially supported), and Play 6. I’ve tried minimal projects where only one player was loaded, and they all fail in Dorico 3 connected to VEP. I’ve also tried every preload imaginable, and none of them make a difference; in testing I haven’t yet run into a project where I have to take any of them above the minimum available preload value, so that’s what I’ve settled upon. I’ve also tried things like whether to turn on Kontakt’s multiprocessor support when running it within VEP; on some systems it seems to be an improvement and on others it makes things way worse. In my particular case it’s the latter, so I have it off in Kontakt and let VEP handle that stuff.

You clearly know more about the technical side of things than I do, so I have no doubt that what you say is correct in theory. But in practice, it simply isn’t the case on my system. Other users have reported something similar; in another thread Bollen describes decoupled as 10x faster than coupled on his system. On my system when running a medium-sized orchestra or larger, decoupled results in a noticeable, but minor and by all means livable, slowdown of note entry in Dorico, whereas coupled results in every operation being delayed by ~30+ seconds of spinning beachball. Add a note, wait 30 seconds. Select an existing note, wait 30 seconds, edit anything about that note, wait 30 seconds, add a slur to existing notes, wait 30 seconds, etc. Decoupled, I can keep autosave on in both VEP and Dorico without any problem, whereas when coupled, autosave results in ~90 seconds of spinning beachball.

Me neither; that was an aside. I don’t work that way; I always use as many instruments per instance as possible (in my case, 16, since multiple ports aren’t usually an option for me). Your hunch that it’s Logic-related is probably spot on, as I believe the people who said they work that way were running Logic.

Sam, if you make sure that you change the name of “Vienna Ensemble Pro 7” in the Endpoint Setup dialog to something much shorter, e.g. “VEPro7”, so that the name doesn’t elide in the VST Instruments panel, do you find things improve?

:neutral_face: Daniel, as I mentioned multiple times already, including in the very first post reporting the trouble, every file I have has very short names for every endpoint. In most cases just two or three characters, such as “V1” or “Vc” … it makes absolutely zero difference.

I realize there’s a lot of info in this thread, but if the team would please take the time to read it, it will probably prove valuable in tracking down the problem. For instance, Dave has mentioned that when he looked at one of my files, the endpoint name had exclamation points in it, even though I’ve never used special characters in an endpoint name, ever.

I have taken the time to read it, including each of the new posts in the thread, but you will I hope forgive me if I occasionally forget a detail. I realise this is the most pressing issue you are dealing with, but I have the combined pressing issues of thousands of users to think about. Ulf, Paul and I didn’t have a chance to discuss this today but we will tomorrow.

Exclamation points in the entry in the VST Instruments rack isn’t anything to worry about: it’s how Dorico shows you that the expected plug-in is not present on your system. It shows the entry in the rack surrounded by a pair of exclamation points by way of a warning.

Sam,

Have you tried deleting the VSTAudioEngine3 folder in your local preferences? I pretty much do this routinely whenever I get a crash.

Of course there is nothing to forgive; I apologize if I made it sound like I thought so.

That’s good to know, thanks for clarifying. (But on the other hand, darn, I’d hoped it might be a clue that lead toward salvation.) Well, I look forward to hearing what the playback/audio engine gurus come up with tomorrow.

Hmmm, that’s one that hasn’t been on my radar yet. I’ll try it when I get back to the studio. Just to make sure I understand: you’re referring to the one located under username/Library/Preferences …? (Basing this on a quick search which found https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=106153&start=25#p895946)

One thing I don’t think I’ve clarified so far: when Dorico 3 freezes, it does so long after the splash screen that lists things like “connecting to audio engine” … usually Dorico 3 passes the splash screen, very occasionally hangs at 90% load of project, but far more frequently, loads the entire project and connects to every available VEP instance, appears normal for two beats … and then beachballs.

Yes. You can delete the whole folder. Dorico will rebuild it when you launch it again. No harm to delete these whenever you think something is amiss.

The VST2 version appears with the suffix x64, while the VST3 version is listed as ‘Vienna Ensemble Pro’ only. We may have different flavours of what I feel is basically the same problem. VEP (VST3) crashes as soon as it’s loaded, but the ramifications and their manifestations are elusive…

We’re still looking into these reports, but in the meantime I would suggest favouring the VST3 version over the VST2 one. If you have VE Pro in your whitelist then I recommend removing it (the whitelist only applies to VST2 plugins - the VST3 plugin will automatically be accepted).

Are you implying that merely having the vst2 version whitelisted can cause problems? I only whitelisted it in D3 yesterday while troubleshooting, but it’s been w/l in D2 since day one and there all is still fine with everything…

Generally if there is a VST3 version of the plugin available then it should usually be used rather than the VST2 version. If it’s hard to tell for the user which one is which in the UI then that’s a good argument for not enabling the VST2 one. I’m not suggesting that it will cause problems, just at the moment we’re trying to work out what’s going wrong on Sam’s machine and so anything that reduces the scope for errors is worth doing.

One thing that we have seen in Sam’s crash reports is that he’s had the exact same crash as dbudde, ptram and sidebysidebyside. See the threads:

So whatever these users did to get things working may help you.

In that case, sure :slight_smile:

Hi Dr. Paul, thanks very much for your attention to the issues I’m having. To clarify, none of the diagnostics I’ve uploaded so far had the VST2 version whitelisted. Before fratveno shared his experiences, the only time I tested the VST2 version was using the Bidule plugin as a bridge. All other tests were of the VST3 version, both directly in Dorico 3 and using Bidule as a bridge. After hearing from fratveno, I did test whitelisting the VST2 version in Dorico 3, but I ran into exactly the same problems I’ve been having for the past month, so at least on Mac OS on my particular machine, it seems to make no difference. I deleted it from the whitelist immediately after verifying this fact.

Unless I’m missing something, the only thing I see in those threads that got it working for other users, is the short endpoint names. Which as I’ve mentioned multiple times, doesn’t make any difference on my system. I’ve tried endpoint names as short as one letter (“x” and “y” for example) and I still have the same problems.

At the following link are new diagnostic infos, a few from yesterday and a bunch from today after trying Dave’s suggestion to trash the VST Audio Engine 3 folder located in Preferences. Trashing that folder and having Dorico 3 rebuild it seems to get things up and running slightly better than previously: I could add an instance without anything crashing, and could even close and re-open the file once or twice … but soon enough I run into the same problems again; trying to open the file caused Dorico to freeze. I’ve tried trashing the folder a few times, and included in the link are copies of the VST Audio Engine 3 folder after each time things started to nosedive, in the hopes that comparing what’s there to the clean install version of the same folder might help pinpoint what’s going wrong?

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Scbb-1fgynSNqn1e5D2XG087WqOIK4Hf

Please note: I did encounter unexpected weirdness after trashing the VST Audio Engine 3 folder, so some of these diagnostic reports may or may not be entirely related to the larger problem I’m experiencing. If I knew how to filter out what’s irrelevant I would do so, but since I have no idea what’s relevant and what isn’t, I defer to your expertise in that regard, and apologize for any extra headaches this creates for you and Ulf.

Hmmm, well here on Mac OS, there’s no suffix for the VST2 version; they both appear identical in the dropdown. It’s the same for any plugin I have both -2 and -3 versions of, so perhaps it’s something Windows-specific that allows Dorico to parse the suffix info? (Or my system is completely cursed; I’m starting to wish I could just ask Apple to replace all my hardware with whatever Dave’s using which is working fine.)

Thanks Dave, it did improve things a little bit temporarily, but the issues promptly returned. And for some reason it seemed to create (if it wasn’t just a very ill-timed coincidence) some strange headaches that took me a few hours to unwrinkle:

The first time I trashed the folder and Dorico rebuilt it, the file I opened had lost all the connection info, so I had to re-establish the instance connections manually. This didn’t happen the second time I had to trash the folder, but something else got weird: when running slave over a local network, I use a Thunderbolt TCP/IP bridge for VEP to pass the data. For some reason the VEP plugin stopped seeing this network (even though it was functioning just fine to transfer files from one Mac to the other), and instead “helpfully” auto-connected via gigabit ethernet, which I haven’t used in ages and had forgotten was still plugged in. It took a lot of hair-pulling to get the Thunderbolt bridge functioning again, and I’m still bewildered how I finally got it back – what ended up finally working was something I’d already tried earlier two or three times, with no luck. I tried it again purely out of insanity and for some reason my apparently-gremlin-infested machine finally decided to cooperate …

One thing I noticed that kicked up after the folder trashing business (though I’m too ignorant to know for sure if correlation bears any relation to causation here) is that suddenly I started getting a lot more eLicenser errors. I wasn’t counting, but it feels like I got as many today as I have over the past month. And the really odd thing is that the window reporting the error (which causes Dorico to freeze if you “click ok to abort”) listed a different app reporting the eLc error each time: once it was Dorico, once it was Synsopos, once it just said " [followed by a blank space, from what I could tell] … once it said Dorico Elements even though I’ve never once downloaded that, much less had it installed on my machine!

I appreciate everyone’s efforts to help and eagerly await any more suggestions of things I might try! I’m swiftly losing (what’s left of) my mind here.

This is just an idea and probably doesn’t matter, but if you still have Dorico 2 on your machine, I’d remove it completely and see if that makes any difference. Make sure you get rid of any preferences and other stuff in the process. Maybe there is some conflict or something going on. I’m sure everyone will say this doesn’t matter at all…

After that if nothing is working, I’d reinstall everything from scratch, and what I mean by that its wipe your machine bare and reinstall the OS and everything else.

The reason I suggest this is because I recently downgraded from Catalina to Mojave so I could make sure the problems I was having weren’t unsupported OS issues. And things did get better for me. So, some of that may have been the OS not yet supported but it may have been too much cruft in my previous installation from years of not doing that. Your machine is older yet and I don’t know when you’ve done this if ever.

The audio engine team have been looking into the crash logs that you have provided, Sam, and at this point they have at least identified what is going wrong. They do not yet know why it is going wrong, however, and nor is there yet a fix for the problem. So for the time being I’m afraid I can’t provide any more helpful advice than for you to stop working on this problem right now. We will let you know if we need any further information from you. I would suggest putting the use of VE Pro on your computer on the back burner for the time being. I believe any solution is going to require updated components from us, and it will take time to find the cause, fix the problem, and test the updated components. It’s also German Unity Day tomorrow, an important national holiday in Germany, which means that most of my colleagues in Hamburg will not be at work again until the start of next week. So patience will be required. I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused, but please be aware that we are working on it.

Indeed, it is a day that symbolized hope for everyone on earth who gives a damn about humanity, regardless of nationality.

Thank you for the update; I believe I understood the gist of it, but just a few questions to clarify:

This only applies to Dorico 3, correct? Or have you discovered that something on my system may corrupt Dorico 2 even though I didn’t experience these problems there previously?

Since I’m one of the few (or possibly only) people who’s reported this problem, I was hoping the culprit would be something about my system which I had control or influence over. I’m not sure if you’re using the term “components” more loosely, or literally in the sense of a bundle or plugin housed in the Components folder, but when a fix has been achieved, will it be something I have to wait until the release of an official update, or will it be possible to send it to me personally once it’s ready? Either way, is there someplace I can sign up to be notified when it’s ready to download? (Edit: I guess I should clarify that even though I think I’ve set up forum notifications correctly, I don’t ever receive them, hence my inquiry re: notification logistics. Thank you.)

My thanks to the team for their attention to this matter and their efforts to fix it.