Dorico 6.2.30 (Mac) crashes on startup if a project template has a non-ASCII (Japanese) name

Dorico
1

Hi,

A note before I start: I’m not a native English speaker, and I prepared this report with the help of an AI to translate and organize it. I also don’t check this forum very often, so I may not be able to reply to follow-up questions. To make up for that, I’ve tried to include all the relevant details and the crash log up front, so the issue can be investigated without needing more information from me.

I wanted to report a reproducible startup crash on macOS that appears to be caused by project templates with non-ASCII (Japanese) filenames.

Environment:

  • Dorico Pro 6.2.30 (this also happened on 6.1.10 before I updated)
  • macOS 14.6.1 (Sonoma)
  • MacBook Air, Apple Silicon (M1)

Symptom:

  • Dorico shows the splash screen, then crashes a couple of seconds later, before reaching the Hub. It never gets to the point of opening any file.
  • Launching in safe mode (holding a modifier key at startup) works fine.

What I found:

  • The crash was caused by my user-created project templates, which had Japanese names. My “Project Templates” folder contained subfolders named in Japanese (the template category and template names were written in Japanese characters).
  • After I renamed those template folders/files to use only ASCII (English) characters, Dorico starts up normally every time.
  • So the trigger seems to be specifically the non-ASCII characters in the project template names, not the templates’ musical content.
  • This may be related to other macOS Japanese-environment issues that have come up before (for example the past issue with the Japanese UI fallback font on macOS).

Crash log detail (in case it helps):

  • The crash report consistently shows the faulting thread terminating inside std::stol / __throw_invalid_argument (an attempt to convert a string to an integer that fails). This happens during startup.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Create or save a project template whose folder/file name contains Japanese (non-ASCII) characters.
  2. Quit and relaunch Dorico.
  3. Dorico crashes shortly after the splash screen.
  4. Rename the template to ASCII-only characters, and Dorico launches normally.

Thank you for looking into this, and apologies again that I may not be able to respond to replies.

Best regards

Dorico 6-2026-06-14-012635.ips (59.9 KB)

2

Just a wild guess: could the length of the Japanese file path (template name plus all the folder names leading to it) be too long (use too many characters)?

3

Could you use romaji rather than traditional Japanese characters?

4

We have seen people post Dorico files on this forum with filenames in a great variety of international scripts, including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. I’d be very surprised if a filename containing Japanese characters would be problematic for that reason alone. As far as I know, all modern operating systems, and, for that matter, Dorico itself, are totally Unicode-compliant.

The problem may be that a file (or enclosing folder) name contains illegal interpunction (comma, colon, semicolon, forward slash, backslash), which interferes with the OS’s file system, or, as mentioned above, there could be a file path that’s simply longer than the OS can handle. Note that most Japanese characters are encoded as double-byte (or even more), so they consume more raw bytes than a plain ASCII string used for English (at least, in UTF-8 encoding), although I still think it shouldn’t matter much.

I assume one of the developers can decipher the crash log and shed some light on it.

5

Thanks for the bug report, @YAM_SIG. I can confirm that this is indeed a problem, and we’ll do our best to fix this as soon as we can.