Dorico 4.3.30 - [SOLVED] After upgrading, ALL of my music apps are taking forever to load

I don’t want to scare anyone as my problem has been solved but I thought I might post this as a PSA in case anyone else runs into this issue or is interested.

After upgrading to Dorico 4.3.30, all of my music apps are taking forever to startup (like 20 min+). Even to the point I started writing to (the other apps) tech support about their software not coming up. Everything was working smoothly before the Dorico 4.3.30 upgrade so this is the only common link I can think of. I have not altered my system in any other way.

Now when I try to open Dorico 4.3.30, it TOO is taking forever to start. I booted it before starting this and I JUST got a msg saying “Could not connect to CoreMIDI. You should retart your System”…

Now 10 minutes later. Dorico is starting up finally! However, when I tried to start up a simple piano score, Dorico crashed. So I restarted.

What is going on? I’ve never seen this problem before. Is it possible it might be related to the Steinberg MediaServer as mentioned in this thread?

After restarting a 3rd time, now all the apps seems to be starting up at normal speed again. I don’t know how it got solved, but everything seems to be working normally again. Everyone is happy again.

With Dorico 4.3.30 and the MediaBay 1.0.20 update (which gets automatically deployed by the Steinberg Download Assistant) this workaround is not needed anymore.

I still wonder what took so long at your place. It is normal that after content installation some service tasks need to be performed, which takes some time, but 20+ minutes is totally beyond that. Maybe it might help to exclude the VST Sound content from virus scans, best after it was installed (to let the scanner at least scan it once) but before the apps are started. This should not be a general rule, as it decreases overall system security.

If such performance issues persist and there is no explanation, the key to insight is “profiling”: recording what the processes are doing (Dorico, VSTAudioEngine, SteinbergMediaBayServer), with tools like sample (macOS) or procdump (windows). The recorded data can then be inspected by the developers to see where a process possibly hangs.