The manual returns 0 results for “diagnostic” and nothing useful for “crashes” and I can find no information there about the Dorico Diagnostics folder. I am getting crashes or freezes at least daily without a noticeable pattern that I can detect. Sometimes I must even force-quit with CTRL-ALT-Delete or even do a system reboot.
How does the Diagnostics folder work and what is it used for? Is it populated automatically or only every time you click ‘Create Diagnostic Report’? Are the reports in there cumulative? What is the connection between that folder and the countless reports I send to Steinberg when prompted by an alert box when restarting Dorico? (And note that I get that prompt sometimes when in the last session there were no problems and Dorico was closed normally with File->Exit)
For example, today Dorico would not start and froze on “audioDeviceBaiosChange: devicePortsChanged” when nothing about the “device ports” or anything else in the audio hardware or settings had changed. And there is now a crash report named “Dorico 5 AudioEngine 5.6.41 64bit 2024.10.2 13.14.58.639-freezedump” that has a size of zero bytes.
At this point Dorico is only marginally better about crashes and freezes than Finale was (and, believe me, that is not a compliment as many here can probably attest!)
Upload the diagnostic report that you create here on this forum and you will receive all the help you will need directly from the designers and experts.
When the report just goes to Steinberg it is anonymous for their development only. Posting it here will get you the help you need and they will fix your problem.
Hi @rayates56 , indeed those zero sized dump files are useless. We also don’t know how that can happen, but we have to find out.
In regards to the Diagnostics folder, there is no such particular folder. Diagnostics are only taken if you actively ask for (Help > Create Diagnostics Report), or sometimes automatically by Dorico, if it detects that something special happened.
Dorico checks during start up if there are new dump files since the last start and then asks you to send them to Steinberg. That’s the whole magic behind, no AI or higher logic.
But we have to find out more about the frequent freezes on your machine. Freezedumps get automatically created when the audio engine detects that it was unresponsive for a certain amount of time. If you go into your Documents folder, there should be the subfolder \Steinberg\CrashDumps. Is there anything inside that is not of zero size? If so, please zip it up and post here, or if too big, send to
u dot stoermer at steinberg do de
It might become a long and stony path on debugging your system, but I’m sure we will find out the cause of the problem.sooner or later. Thank you for your collaboration.
Hi @Ulf , may I ask the same favour please! It crashes quite often, what is not a big issue as I’m mostly working on small files, so I don’t loose many data especially being aware of case and saving regurarly but takes loads of time to restart PC quite often. Thanks:)
Thanks, Ulf. The CrashDumps folder has 8 files, all are 0 KB in size.
The crashes/freezes seem to happen in a wide variety of situations: Endless loop waiting for the audio engine on startup (closing and immediately restarting always fixes that). The “audioDeviceBaiosChange: devicePortsChanged” error I already mentioned. Or suddenly just disappearing on a random click somewhere.
Another impression is that it “feels” like it sometimes just gets overloaded if too much is asked of it too fast, and it locks up. For instance, once I tried to select several flows in a large file and delete them all at once and it never came out of the loop. I now do something like that one-at-a-time with ‘Apply’ after each one, wait until it really is done with that task (even do a save), then delete the next. I have to slow myself down similarly with MIDI note input. On Finale I could really fly with MIDI note entry and everything buffered seamlessly; with Dorico I trudge. (Sorry, about making such un-useful comparisons, but it is central the experience, so far.) It just doesn’t seem very robust; I am always treading lightly.
If it sits open for an hour or two, it’s 50-50 whether it will wake up out of sleep or have to be restarted.
(On a positive note, I still am completely happy that I have switched, have completed hundreds of pages of projects in just a few weeks, and never lost any data.)
Started Dorico immediately after the note posted above and it asked to send a report to Steinberg. The file was stored in C:\Users\richa\AppData\Local\CrashDumps . It is too large to post here. I have sent it by email.
UPDATE:
[I am posting this here in case it is useful for anyone else. ]
Ulf looked at the CrashDump I sent him by email. He said to
“Go to the folder C:\ProgramData\boost_interprocess then there should be a directory with a numeric name that has a single file in it called CachedFileDataProviderManager. Simply delete that whole folder and it should be fine again on the next run.” That file is apparently then rebuilt, so I would think anyone could safely try this solution.
I followed the instruction and two days later: after deleting CachedFileDataProviderManager, I used Dorico all day yesterday. There were no crashes, freezes, delays or slowdowns. Files seemed to open faster. MIDI Note Input was smoother. I left it running while the computer was in Sleep Mode overnight and it woke up as refreshed as I was.
Hasn’t worked for me—no Steinberg/Dorico files in that folder, deleting the numeric folder in C:\ProgramData\boost_interprocess doesn’t help. Dorico won’t start. Also no non-zero files in \Documents\Steinberg\CrashDumps.