First off, inserting an edit point with the pencil doesn’t work until you’ve done it the second time and doing so always seems to place that point somewhere other than 0. Then adding additional points works fine although it would be much better if the points didn’t have to snap to the grid. Document gets saved and I think all is well but then I go back and try to edit those points to create a deeper pitch bend, etc. than I originally set and almost every time I try to select one of the points, the program crashes. Then the sound cuts out. I check to make sure Halion has it’s sounds loaded and they work when clicking on the piano keyboard at the bottom, but playing back the file or selecting individual notes produces no sound until I quit Dorico and restart it.
Dorico 3 has some great, great new features but so far I’m finding lots of problems.
Can you please do Help > Create Diagnostic Report and attach the resulting zip file here so we can get a look at the crash logs? If possible, please also provide a project in which clicking on an existing point in the pitch bend editor causes a crash. Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience.
I really do need to see the project in which you experience the problem as well. To attach it, find it in the Finder, right-click and choose the Compress item from the context menu to zip it up into a zip file. Then attach it here. Please also specify exactly where you are clicking when the program crashes. Thank you!
I haven’t been able to determine an exact sequence of clicks that cause the crash. As for the project, it does it on any and all projects and does it sporadically. I never know when it’s coming and suddenly “crash”. I don’t memorize every click I’ve made that leads up to the crash because I never know when it’s going to happen.
Consequently, I’ll just continue working with it and “if” and “when” I can see it happening more predictably I will get back to you with specifics. In the meantime there’s this: As I mentioned, I write mostly for sax quartet and I had created a template in D2 so when starting a new project I had less prep work setting everything up. Since our last communication I discovered that using that template in D3 I had 2 iterations of the same instrument set up in Halion, assigned to different channels. I decided to just started over and created a new template in D3. Since then I’ve not had the crash happen again. This is probably crazy but maybe the problem has something to do with using projects created in D2? I’ll keep an eye out for when it happens again and see if that might be the case. Anyway, thanks for responding and I’ll keep you posted if I can determine anything consistent.
I had a similar problem, using an upgraded project (also with sax!) I experienced several crashes when editing the envelope for CC7. Do you want me to send in Diagnostics after the next crash?
Yes, please provide the diagnostics, and ideally also the project file you were editing when the crash occurred. If you can remember which instrument and where in the music you were editing when the crash happened, so much the better.
Sorry for jumping in here but I’ve experienced the exact same thing. As the above said, you can enter the dots quite well, but it you go back a little later to alter them, simply touching the dots will cause the whole program to crash. I found this to be especially true with CC0. The instruments I’m working with are all Kontakt instruments, but it doesn’t seem to care which ones. Anything I can send on to you to help figure it out?
Certainly if you have a project that seems particularly prone to crash, I’d love to see it, and please also do Help > Create Diagnostic Report and attach that zip file too. Sorry for the inconvenience. I’m sure we’ll be able to get to the bottom of this soon.
Just to echo musicplay’s and Timothy’s experiences, I’m having significant problems with the pitch bend controller, as well.
Changing the rhythmic grid is definitely an issue. If I start plotting pitch bend values on the timeline, and then figure that I need to refine the shape of my curve, I increase the resolution of the grid – then promptly lose whatever edits I had made.
Also, preexisting values on the pitch bend timeline will be suddenly misrepresented; they’ll play back fine, but a value that was, say, 17 previously will now show as 1 in the interface. It definitely happens after I change the resolution of the rhythmic grid, but even just zooming the view in Play Mode has produced this effect. Stuff like that.
After a particular bend in my score, which was set back to zero as usual after the note played, I heard an odd decaying effect in which successive notes gradually pitched downward, as though the whole melody were “melting.” In an attempt to pinpoint the cause, I erased the relevant control points from the timeline – whereupon the pitch bend played anyway. Another instance of the values on the graph (nonexistent, in this case) clearly not representing what would be played back. (I’ve posted to my personal web site a video that demonstrates this particular bug. Despite edits to the pitch bend controller, including massively changing values and even deleting them, playback remains the same.)
As the title of this thread indicates, I’ve had Dorico 3 crash on me a few times when entering or moving (I can’t recall which, precisely) pitch bend values, too. Fortunately, I haven’t lost a significant amount of work when this has happened; I’m in Paranoid Mode, now, so I’m constantly saving after even just a few modest changes to my score. Plus Dorico seems to be good about recovering work after a crash, so thumbs-up, there.
Regarding your video, it looks like you may be in an area of slightly undefined behaviour. You have independent voice playback enabled for that instrument but you are in the ‘All voices’ view. The pitch bend data is specific to each playback voice. The UI should really prevent you from showing and editing pitchbend data in this case, but it doesn’t. If you select a voice to edit from the voice dropdown then you should be able to independently edit the pitch bend for each voice. I can see that there is a display bug that happens occasionally in independent voice mode where no MIDI CC data is drawn. If this happens, switching to Write mode and back to Play Mode seems to refresh it. I’ll try to isolate the specific display bug there.
I suspect this independent voice issue could be obscuring some of the other things you are seeing (eg if I change the resolution then the display goes blank, but if I switch to Write mode and back the values reappear). If you have any crash logs then I would like to receive them so we can work out what’s going on. If you have steps that reproduce the crash then that’s even better.
Thanks, Doc. That was indeed the problem, i.e. being able to edit MIDI control points for specific voices in “All Voices” mode in the UI. Once I switched the drop-down to the proper voice, everything worked fine, and I was able to get playback to execute as intended.
I’ll send you an e-mail if I manage reliably to reproduce the crash issue. So far, though, everything’s actually working well enough; some minor annoyances, like newly-introduced pitch bend not playing at all until I close then reopen the project (as mentioned by musicplay, above), but nothing that interminably breaks playback. I am loving Dorico 3 immensely!
Is this “just” the fundamental limitation of the Play UI at present, that you can’t create a “step change” in a controller value, only a line drawn between two values at different times?
You can create step changes with playing techniques but not by drawing. Trying to mix playing techniques and drawing for the same controller opens another can of worms, though.
Hey Rob, no, it was happening because I was editing in “All Voices” mode, when I should have been editing for the specific voice to which I’d applied the pitch bend. (As Paul Walmsley pointed out, Dorico needs to be fixed such that, once control data have been applied to a particular voice, it isn’t possible to edit it in “All Voices” mode.)
The steady decrease in pitch was the result of a bend of -5 somewhere further in time after I had set it back to zero. In “All Voices” mode, I wasn’t seeing this. Switching to the voice comprising the pitch bend revealed it to me; once I deleted it, my music stopped “melting.”
Hmm, I’ve created step changes for MIDI controllers many times; in fact, it’s how I simulate fortepiano dynamics. (Going from loud to soft at the same point on the timeline.) Perhaps I don’t understand what you mean…?
If I try to change a controller from say 0 to 100, by drawing in play mode, the best I can do put the two values on adjacent rhythmic grid points. But Dorico then sends intermediate values (e.g. 25, 50, 75 in the attachments).
For dynamics this probably doesn’t matter. If you are using a controller where different values represent different key switches or whatever, the result is useless.
If you can get a step change at “a single point on the time line” I would be very interested to find out how to do it.
Of course you can do it by making two playing techniques which set the controller to 0 and 100, but then you don’t see the graph at all…
I’m having the exact same problem here. It’s impossible for me to replicate the problem because it happens “randomly” (I know it’s not random, but I haven’t been able to reproduce the problem intentionally). The only thing every crash has in common is that it happens while editing pitch bend. Sometimes Dorico freezes. Sometimes it crashes. When it freezes, and I have to force quit, the next time I open Dorico, audio playback doesn’t work. The play button appears greyed out. I have to quit and restart Dorico a second time, and then it’s just as nothing ever happened; everything is working all right. I try to repeat the exact steps that led to the previous crash or freeze, but it doesn’t happen. Everything works just fine. I can edit pitch bend without problems. But some minutes later, working on other part of the score, again editing pitch bend, it happens again. And the cycle goes on and on.
I’ve tried in different projects (5 different files: one created from scratch today just to try this issue, one upgraded from Dorico 2 version, one created from scratch in Dorico 3 a few weeks ago with many flows, and two other normal files I had laying around) and with every single one of them it has happened. It always happens trying to edit pitch bend (no matter if it has independent voice enabled or not). It doesn’t always happen; just sometimes, “randomly”.
Here’s the diagnostic report and the last project it happened with.
The last time it happened, I was editing pitch bend for the harp in bar 103 of flow 5. I tried to bend from 0 to 20 going from each eight note to the other in order to mimic a pedal gliss. Dorico froze. I forced quit, reopened; playback didn’t work (play button grayed out). Normally quit Dorico and reopened. Now it’s working like a charm. I’ve been able to edit pitch bend for the harp in bar 103 of flow 5.
Before this one, it happened editing pitch bend for the violin 1 in bar 45 of flow 5. Same story, but this time it crashed. Reopened, discarded the backup files Dorico recovered. Everything worked just fine (you can check the edits made for the violin 1 in bar 45 in the project I’m sending.
I understand your frustrations, but unfortunately there’s no news. Paul has been working in this area of the program recently and it is possible that the rework he has been doing will have eliminated this problem, but since we have been unable to reproduce the problem at all in-house, we cannot say for certain.
As I mentioned in another thread (Gradual Tempos (line tool) crashes Dorico - Dorico - Steinberg Forums), I’ve been working in this area for a few weeks doing a lot of editing of automation data and I haven’t experienced the crash myself once. This suggests that it’s caused by a very precise combination of actions, eg whether you click on a point and drag or marquee-select a single point and then drag it. I’ve loaded the score you attached and edited the pitch bend data in those bars and I cannot make it crash. If you can describe an exact sequence of actions that will reproduce the crash every time then I can check to see if it’s still crashing in my build. As Daniel says, I’ve rewritten a lot of this code so it’s quite likely this crash no longer occurs.
If Dorico crashes then you’ll need to kill the VSTAudioEngine process too so that playback will work correctly when you restart Dorico.
