I’m using Dorico Version 5.1.51.2153 on an iMac Retina 5K, 27", 2020. Since upgrading from Dorico 4 my Mac has been crashing when I’m in the middle of using Dorico. I can’t pinpoint any particular task I’m doing in the program when it happens. Attached are a few recent crash reports from my Mac, all from the last few hours.
Dorico 5-2024-09-18-150140.ips (88.8 KB)
panic-full-2024-09-18-185033.0003.ips (3.4 MB)
Some additional reports…
WindowServer-2024-09-18-144934.ips (1.2 MB)
panic-full-2024-09-18-173709.0003.ips (108.9 KB)
What macOS version are you running?
Please pull down the Apple menu and hit About this Mac to find out.
Sonoma 14.7. Sorry, I should have known to communicate that…
From Dorico’s Help menu, create a diagnostic report, and upload it here. That will contains lots more information than just the OS analytics.
90% of the time, it’s caused by additional VST plug-ins.
This is a kernel panic, which means that it’s a crash in the low levels of the OS. Often the causes for this are things like malfunctioning devices or RAM and buggy drivers. Graphics card and their drivers are often the cause. See some of the suggestions on this thread:
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (278.5 KB)
I’ve also posted inquiries about this on the Apple Community Forums, in case this is more Mac-related than Dorico-related. Nothing posted here or there has been successful yet, unfortunately. Can anyone check out Dorico’s diagnostic report, posted above?
Attached is a report from Etrecheck:
etrecheck.pdf (104.1 KB)
I love EtreCheck, as it provides all the relevant information you need.
Any problem with your Mac will be one of three things:
A Bug in the OS would likely affect large numbers of users, and generate lots of internet traffic.
Testing should always start with ruling out the third-party software. You can read through the EtreCheck report, and see what’s listed.
For each item, ask: “Do I need it?” and “Is it up-to-date”.
You’ve got Acrobat Reader 9 installed? Surely that doesn’t work? Support ended over a decade ago. Get rid of it. Use the latest version of Reader, or another PDF viewer.
You’ve got DisplayLink drivers, are you using an additional display? (Why not via TB adaptor?)
Internet plug-ins have long been abandoned as a technology. Shockwave? Silverlight? Scorch?
You’ve not got loads of VSTs, so I don’t know why Dorico should be bringing everything down. What’s “MMAudio Device”? And a GM Audio Unit from 2010?
I’d remove HALion Sonic SE 3.5, as you’ve got HALion Sonic 7.
Is that Soundflower kernel extension up-to-date? Unlikely.
And as usual, you can see how terrible Chrome is! 
(To say nothing of the privacy issues.)
This was a big help… I deleted some old stuff. Got another crash from Dorico unfortunately. Here’s the latest report…
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (311.5 KB)
I have taken a quick look at this, but I don’t really have a clear picture of what is going on. As @benwiggy suggests, it’s definitely worth removing the HALion Sonic SE 3.5 as that is known to cause crashes on current MacOS versions.
I can see that the audio engine is sometimes taking up to 3 minutes to start up, so either it’s taking a long time to scan plugins (which seems unlikely because not many are listed) or one of them is taking a long time.
So one of the crashes is when the audio engine was taking a long time and either Dorico timed out or was killed, and then you started Dorico again. However, the audio engine was still initialising and so they got into a weird state. @Ulf may have some more ideas next week. (Ulf: this is [TST-6684)
Hi @btodorovich87 and @PaulWalmsley ,
from my perspective, that long start-up of the audio engine is due to the crash of Dorico. The audio engine makes a callback to Dorico, Dorico crashes and the audio engine is waiting. Eventually it will time out and continue like normal. That would be my explanation.
What I am more concerned about is that it appears as if every second run of the audio engine shows an incomplete log file, that means it did not shut down the normal way but was killed somehow. Since there are no crash dumps of the audio engine, I must assume that the process got actively killed in those cases. Is that correct @btodorovich87 ?
Hi everyone,
I think I have this fixed. I went through and deleted a bunch of old software, plugins, unsigned files, etc - and started using Firefox instead of Chrome. Since then I haven’t had the problem. Thanks to all who replied!