Dorico 4 Pro Crashing

After upgrading to Dorico 4 Pro, I’ve started experiencing some instability.

  1. Periodically, like once every 5 minutes, Dorico will freeze and the mouse symbol will change to a swirling circle, indicating that Dorico is very busy. In about 5-10 seconds the mouse changes back to normal and I get control back. This NEVER happened in Dorico 3.5 Pro.
  2. About once a day, Dorico has been crashing and it doesn’t seem to matter what I’m doing. The latest action was to simply try to unmute a track and Dorico crashed and completely closed (I checked task manager on my Windows 10 system).

I’ve got one problem though… the ‘Dorico Diagnostics.zip’ file is 6 MB which this forum is saying is too big. So, to whom do I sent the zip?

Please send to ‘u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de’. Thanks

When Dorico pauses every five minutes or so, that’s because of auto-save. If you are using a large sample library hosted directly within Dorico, e.g. running Kontakt or EW Play or similar, then when Dorico saves, it also has to save all of the states of the VST plug-ins that are loaded. Depending on how much data these plug-ins save, this can take an appreciable amount of time. If your Dorico projects are very large on disk, say above 10MB, then that is most likely the cause of the hold-up.

You have a couple of options: you can either disable auto-save in Preferences, or perhaps increase the auto-save interval so you are not waiting so often for the data to be written to disk. Or you could consider adding Vienna Ensemble Pro to your setup. VE Pro allows you to host large numbers of VST plug-ins and save and load configurations independently, and usefully has something called “decoupled” mode, where it doesn’t save its state when the host application saves the project. This means your Dorico project files would be much smaller (since they would no longer contain all of the data from the loaded VST plug-ins, since VE Pro would take care of that) and auto-save would also be much quicker.

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I just checked and both 3.5 and 4.0 were set to a default value of auto save every five minutes, but I’ve never touched them until tonight. I reset them to 15 minutes.

Thanks for the heads-up. However I don’t recall the delays on auto save being as long in 3.5.

The time it takes to save is dependent entirely on the scope of the VST instruments you’re using, down to the level of which patches are loaded, and how long that takes to be written to disk. There’s no difference between Dorico 3.5 and Dorico 4 in the way this is done, so any difference in performance will be down to the sounds you are using.

Hi Ulf, I finally sent you the diagnostic file via gmail. Thanks.

Thanks very much. We’ll have a look.

Dorico crashed again tonight. This time all I was trying to do was change a playback technique with the popover from detache to martele.

I will email the file as last time.

Again, this never happened with Dorico 3.5 Pro.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you, but the file below is for another crash that just happened right now (29 Mar 2022 @10:07 PM):

I had been adding playing techniques over some eighth notes, specifically sustained martele, and alternating back and forth between simple detache, like as follows (I had just entered the text in the popover and pressed [Enter]. I was getting ready to add the > and tenuto signs and then hide the popover text when it crashed, but hadn’t started that yet:

image

I just sent the diagnostic zip file to you.

Hi @rothvin , thanks for the diagnostics. It’s a crash in the Qt framework… I’ve sent it to the Londoners for deeper analysis.

Qt framework?

Is that like Xamarin?

It is a set of libraries with basic building blocks for standard functionality in a program, e.g. the drawing of windows, menus and so on. So with this you don’t need to build a program from the very bottom but have already a basic infrastructure from where you can build upon.