Dorico goes zombie if shutdown vetoed

While I have a Dorico project open and modified, I try to shut down Windows (11). It correctly vetoes the shutdown, but then Dorico cannot be opened. It shows in the taskbar and hovering over it shows the current page, but clicking the taskbar icon does nothing. So I end up losing whatever unsaved changes there were, which has cost me hours re-entering from the PDFs of the parts.

This sounds as if the Audio Engine is shutting down before Dorico, not the order in which I would expect.

Hi @jrandall ,
did that just recently happen to you? Do you remember roughly the time it was?
Please do from the Dorico menu Help > Create Diagnostics Report and post the corresponding zip file here. I want to see if there are crash files of the audio engine.
And don’t you have AutoSave switched on? With that you should be able to recover most of your work.

Did you not have an auto-save document, which would have all but the last 5 mins or so?

I opened a project, made a small change and then asked to shutdown Windows. It told me that Dorico had unsaved changes and I canceled the shutdown. At that point Dorico was non-responsive. I could minimize it and restore it to full size, but it remained non-responsive. I killed it with the Task Manager and restarted it, then asked for the diagnostic report.

Dorico Diagnostics.zip (609 KB)

I found auto save in the preferences and it was switched on.

What I experience is this: I work on an arrangement and make lots of changes: setting the engraving template, layout options, fonts, and engraving options. In one recent chart I inserted measures and rewrote a section. I hit ^S to save, then switched to Print mode and saved all the parts as PDF. The next day, after rehearsal, I wanted to make some changes to the pick-up bar at the start. I opened the project and it appeared to have reverted to before the last round of edits. I found the backup files folder and tried opening previous versions, but none of them had the changes. I used the PDFs to re-enter the changes I had made.

This has happened several times, on different projects. After the first time I have become diligent about saving often while working, yet it still happens. I’m hoping that it’s related to the shutdown issue somehow, because I can’t reproduce it at will so it would be hard for you to fix. (this is where it goes zombie after an attempted shutdown and I am unable to save anything).

Since I’m transitioning from Sibleius, most of the time my projects were musicxml files which I imported. I find that even though the instrument names are correct, the transposition is not. Going through setup and asking to to change instrument to the same instrument fixes that.

That is very weird. Are you saving into something like OneDrive, or Dropbox? Or might you have the same project open in an iPad or a second computer?

Hi @jrandall , thanks for the data.
Okay, in the audio engine log I see “Server shall not quit” because it thinks there are still unsaved data, so it refuses Dorico’s request to shutdown and goes into idling. It appears that Dorico then does not send any further request any more and everything is stuck. I will do further tests on my end. Thanks for reporting that issue.
In the meantime, AutoSave should be your best friend. Or, before shutting down Windows, simply close Dorico first.

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Yes, very weird. All your questions seem applicable, but no - local hard drive (SSD), no other copies of Dorico accessing the file. I’m watching it very closely now to see if a clue emerges.

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Hi,
I’ve been living with this for a while and just got bit again. (In spite of my best efforts to remember to save first).

Would you consider making Dorico auto-save on Export or Print? That would take care of my issue.

Just curious - I was a professional scientific software developer for my career and am now retired. Do you ever grant access to the source so others can contribute to fixing things? I don’t expect so, but thought I’d ask.

My assumption would be 100% closed source. I, as well, would love to tinker with a few things but alas…

As already suspected, yes, 100% closed our sources are, because we regard them our crown jewels and don’t hand them out.
@jrandall, I don’t really know the built-in Lua scripting facilities, but could that may be the solution. It is worth trying it out.

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