Dorico crashes when deactivating certain projects having contained divisi

Dorico
,
1

Hello Dorico team,

When having certain projects open that contain or have once contained divisi, opening any other project (with or without divisi) and choosing the ‘Do Not Activate’ option when prompted in the ‘Activate Project for Playback’ dialogue and then later activating it by clicking the power button in the upper panel, Dorico crashes and quits automatically, sometimes leaving the VSTAudioEngine process open, forcing me to manually force quit the process in order to reopen Dorico.

Some further details:

  • If there are any instruments present that contain divisi or have had divisi deleted from them, Dorico will crash when following the steps above. In order to avoid it, you can delete the divisi-contaminated instruments and replace them with new fresh ones, but once you add another divisi to any instrument the problem immediately returns.
  • I seem to be able to reproduce this regardless of the endpoint setups in the corrupted (?) project and the other project (including using the ‘Silence’ playback template).
  • It only happens if I click the ‘Do Not Activate’ button and activate the other project later manually (as opposed to clicking ‘Activate’ and having Dorico reload the sounds every time I switch to and from this project).
  • It only affects certain projects and I have not yet figured out why only these specific projects are affected.

As per usual demand I will submit a stripped down version of one of my corrupted projects (with the contaminated instruments replaced with fresh ones). I also created a diagnostics file, but unfortunately it was too large to submit here (maybe I can delete unnecessary stuff from it?). Computer specs and software versions can be found on my profile page.

Here follows a more detailed reproduction guide:

  1. Open my project (found attached).
  2. Open another project. Click ‘Do Not Activate’ in the ‘Activate Project for Playback’ dialogue.
  3. Click the power button in the top panel to activate the playback for the newly opened project.
  4. Note that Dorico has not crashed yet! (You are free to close the newly opened project.)
  5. In my project, change the divisi for any of the section players.
  6. Save my project!
  7. Repeat steps 2 and 3.
  8. Note that Dorico crashes after adding the divisi! (In order to reopen Dorico on Windows 10, you might first need to force quit the VSTAudioEngine process if it’s still running e.g. in the Task Manager.)
  9. Open my project again (which you saved).
  10. Delete your newly added divisi change.
  11. Save my project!
  12. Repeat steps 2 and 3.
  13. Note that Dorico still crashes, even after deleting the divisi! (In order to reopen Dorico on Windows 10, you might first need to force quit the VSTAudioEngine process if it’s still running e.g. in the Task Manager.)
  14. Open my project again (which you saved).
  15. Delete the instrument which had the divisi. (Optionally, you can add a similar one to restore the order.)
  16. Repeat steps 2 and 3.
  17. Note that Dorico did not crash this time after the entire instrument was deleted!

All the best and good luck! :wink:
2022-02-05 Crash When Deactivating.dorico (769.5 KB)

2

I realized that I forgot to mention the following: the problem appears to go away once I delete all players except for the ensemble players (the string section) which is why I have included so many players in my submitted project.

3

Please send me your diagnostic report by email to d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de, and I’ll take a look to see what might be going on.

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4

I’ve been discussing this issue with Paul and we think the divisi aspect is a red herring, because the crashes you have sent us are all in the code that handles restoration of the state of the audio engine when activating or re-activating a project.

If you’re able to reproduce the problem with a pair of smaller projects, please let us know. We’ll continue to keep our eye out for similar problems.

5

Hello again,

I just tried this again, and the problem seems to have gone away, without changing anything in the project file or changing any Dorico settings. As far as I remember, the only major thing that happened to my system between the last time I tried this and today, is that I installed a Windows 10 update, but of course it could be anything. Anyway, I’ll keep my eyes open!

6

Hi,

Dorico suddenly crashed again while switching between projects. Both projects had divisi (if that helps). Here is the diagnostics file:

7

This is a different crash, in the audio engine itself this time. Ulf says that the audio engine team have seen this problem before and a fix will eventually make its way into the version of the audio engine that Dorico uses.

1 Like