I like the philosophy and potential of Dorico 3. However, I am finding it very unstable running on MacOS on a 2017 MacBook Pro with plenty of RAM. After using the program for 10-15 minutes it simply becomes unresponsive and starts to a crawl. I then need to kill it and restart. Happens every time. Also, the program crashes frequently. In short, the potential for the software is there, but it should never be released in this form and it’s hard to justify the cost with this type of behavior. Still, I will keep trying.
A search of the forum showed many other users with the same issues with crawling behavior and requirements to restart and/or random crashes. So, apparently, this is not an isolated issue. I tried on a different machine and experienced the same issue.
Can you describe your Dorico project, and can you describe your computer? On a 2015 dual-core Macbook Pro (see my footer), I can happily run a 10 flow project with four or five instruments/players. A single player project with 40 flows slows down, and so does a 12 player flow with six or seven flows. The more flows or the more players, the more Dorico slows down. This is to be expected, especially if you’re running a computer with fewer than four cores, but there are variables and thus far you haven’t really described any of them.
I’m not defending Dorico, but forums like this are precisely for problems, so posts about crashes are not necessarily representative of the typical user experience.
If you‘re willing to post your crash logs, which is a relatively quick process, the team can identify the problem and work on a solution, both for you and for other users.
I cannot figure out how to post attachments…they are either too big or the wrong format. If I can solve that problem I would love to share the crash logs.
The only files you can attach here are images or zip files. It’s a mildly annoying limitation of the forum software. If you have a crash log, zip it before attaching.
there are no crash logs for most of it b/c I need to force quit. I get the spinning beach ball and then I need to kill it.
it seems Dorico gets confused easily.
Again, this is unusual behaviour (I’ve billed over 2000 hours behind Dorico in the last 3 years, and I’ve “confused” it less than five times). Give us some details of your project and your computer and we’ll be able to tell you whether this is normal or not, at least…
I expect the issues you are experiencing are the audio engine crashes that a number of Mac users have been troubled by, which are particularly likely to occur on Catalina but which also appear to happen on Mojave. We don’t yet know what the factors are that cause these crashes, but my suspicion is that it may be linked to particular models of Mac or CPU, since some users seem to experience the crashes often, and others are not experiencing them at all. We are looking into them as a matter of urgency and will provide more information as soon as we have it.
In the meantime, it would be helpful to have your crash logs, which will be being produced by the audio engine when Dorico becomes unresponsive: Dorico becomes unresponsive because the audio engine is crashing.
Do Help > Create Diagnostic Report and that will produce a file called “Dorico Diagnostics.zip” on your desktop. Attach it here.
Although I am still having problems - I am not convinced that Dorico is the cause. It may indeed be tied to the audio engine since if that is not activated (using the Silence input mode) I usually do not have any problems. At any rate if it starts to slow down, I just save and quit and then start up again which seems to clear the issue. But again this might be solely an audio engine problem. I will keep watching.
It would still be helpful to see the logs. If Dorico is producing crash logs when it or the audio engine crashes, then they will be collected up when you choose Help > Create Diagnostic Report, and I would still be interested to see the logs from the audio engine’s crashes. We can’t help any further without them.
There are so many different possibilities of what plugins/machines that it must drive the development team crazy… I think I’ve stumbled through a couple of answer/causes that the team may or may not find useful:
Some of my plugins are subscription based. I’ve found that if they have a problem connecting to a license server, they often appear to hang Dorico without showing any kind of error. Dorico just sits there unresponsive. The network problem seems to be related to the proxy they have set up in a building I work in, so its pretty easy for me to reproduce. I can try to load a project 15 times and Dorico will never run, but switch to a cellular hotspot and it runs with no issues. Switch back to the original normal network while the project is up - it still runs perfect, can upload, down etc. - until I do something that would load in a different sample or VST and the project hangs… Switch to hotspot - that instrument loads fine. VST’s are EWQL and Slate Digital.
Its not TOTALLY that simple. Sometimes after an (apparently) VST induced crash the project won’t load ANY samples, even if I’ve rebooted. The cure seems to be to load a different default project with Halion or something first, and then open the crashed project.
Quite agree. But the last diagnostic file I sent contained nothing you could use. Perhaps I’m looking for it in the wrong place?
Another oddity. I had Dorico running for about six hours. At the end of the 6th hour, the graphics started to do strange things (like stems going invisible). It usually cleared if I switched from Gallery to Page view (or vice-versa) but it was just as easy to save, close, and then open again.
One would almost suspect a memory leak although I haven’t run into many of those in Windows 10.