Dorico doesn't load, "cannot connect the audio engine" on MAC

Dorico
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Dorico doesn’t load, “cannot connect the audio engine” on MAC…MY Pro Tools and Ableton Live works flawlessly, only Dorico “can’t connect”, whet start the programs seems searching something in the VSTs, and than getting firs error message “The Audio engine is taking longer than expected to respond” and than another…
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (464.9 KB)

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Very quick reply as it is already pretty late here in Europe:
Please do a reboot of your machine and try again. On many cases this was the magic that brought the audio engine back to life. If not, I’d like to have a remote screen sharing session with you, if that is okay with you. In that case please send me a private message via this board. Thanks.
P.s.: I’m off to bed now but I’ll be back early tomorrow morning

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I have this same problem. I’m on a Mac M4 Mini, so the other threads referring to Halion Sonic don’t help me. Pretty much every day, and sometimes several times in a day, Dorico will hang when I try to open a file. This seems to happen more often during times when I am opening, editing, and saving many files. It almost always happens if I try to open several files at once. I have read elsewhere how to reset Apple Audio in the terminal. This doesn’t help me. The only thing that works is a complete reboot.

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Update: Right after posting I discovered the advice to kill the process called VSTAudioEngine using Activity Monitor. That does work! Easier than a reboot at least.

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Hi @GregoryAnderson , before killing the audio engine process could you please take a sample of the process via the Activity Monitor app? The audio engine must be in a deadlocked state somehow. I would like to find out more behind it.

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Hey Ulf! Well this morning, so far, instead of hanging, Dorico did crash on startup, after I had opened and closed several files, then quit Dorico itself. Here’s the Diags zip file. I’ll definitely post more if/when I get the next hang instead.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (2.4 MB)

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Thanks for the data @GregoryAnderson ,
but unfortunately it does not contain a single crash file, neither a freeze dump.
If you go to the Console.app and in there on the left click the Crash Log tab, does it show anything from Dorico or VSTAudioEngine?

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I’ll get to your last question in a moment, but … Dorico hung and this time I could sample VSTEngine. In this case, I had one file already open, and tried to open a 2nd file.
Sample of VST Audio Engine.txt.zip (63.7 KB)

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Looking in Console.app, I see no crash reports for Dorico or VSTAudioEngine. Looking in other categories, I found only one Diagnostic Report for Dorico. It’s from a few days ago, so I can’t tell you what I was doing at the time, but I’ve attached it here for your reference.
Dorico 5_2025-04-17-142707_BodhiPup.txt.zip (8.9 KB)
Best,
Greg

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I had to force quit Dorico, so here’s the crash log.
Dorico Crash 2025-04-24 1.txt.zip (389.2 KB)

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Oh, I forgot to mention, I’m using NotePerformer and its Playback Engines, in case that helps.

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Hi @GregoryAnderson ,
thanks for all the data, but there are still no crash files. Dorico is at maximum frozen but not crashed, so I wonder how we do get forward with your case.
You said you get it quite frequently. Is there any chance that you can provoke it and that you could show it to me in a remote screen sharing session?

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It might be possible, but it occurs rather randomly, and we may have a hard time linking up due to the time difference (I’m in the States). That said, it does happen more frequently after a few hours of working with Dorico, opening/closing many files.

But, please forgive my ignorance here, I’m not sure how to get the crash report you need. Can you be more specific? Do you mean I need to make Dorico crash (i.e. make itself go away) rather than just hang forever? I’m not sure I see many outright crashes, more frequently I have to “force quit” it myself.