Dorico quitting unexpectedly

I purchased Dorico 3.5 on 1/11/21, and in the past few days it is closing of its own volition when I’m in the middle of working. Anyone else having this issue? MacBook Pro, 2016, running Big Sur 11.1.

Hi Steven, welcome to the forum and sorry to hear about your trouble.
Please do in Dorico ‘Help > Create Diagnostics Report’ and attach the corresponding zip file here. It contains lots of files that give us deeper insights into what is happening on your machine. Thanks

Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.2 MB)

Thank you for the reply - I have tried to be more conscientious about the number of windows and projects I have open at once (both within and outside of Dorico) and that has helped. No unexpected closings until one recently when I had several projects open at once again. It does seem related to how much stuff I’m trying to make the program and my machine do simultaneously. I’m likely asking for too much at a time?

Thanks for the data, it contains one crash file of Dorico. We will have closer look.

We had ad look at the crash file but we’ve never seen a similar pattern before and unless we can reproduce it in-house, there is few chance to fix it.
You say that it is running much more stable now for you. Let’s keep an eye on it and if you have crashes again, please come back with more diagnostics reports and possibly steps of how to reproduce the crash. Thank you very much.

Ok, thank you. I will be sure to do a diagnostics report following any future crash.

In fact our colleague Paul did recognise this kind of report after a bit of further examination, and it looks like it might be related to switching between two or more open projects, e.g. when closing Dorico, or when closing a project, or when doing File > Save All. Can you remember what in particular you were doing when the application crashed?

I cannot remember exactly, but I will try to note in future instances. I can say that I am in the habit of having multiple projects open and switching between them while leaving them all open. I have tried to limit myself to only having 2 Dorico projects open at a time and that seems to be fine. In previous crashes I had at least 3 projects open. Also, I never use “File>Save All” so that is not a factor in my crash. Thank you.

Dorico Diagnostics.zip (627.4 KB)

Here is a diagnostic immediately following Dorico freezing up. I had to force quit after 5 minutes of the “spinning wheel.” I just reopened and after generating the report I tried to play my project and am back to the “wheel.” The program is not quitting unexpectedly, but 2 freeze-ups in a row.

Hi Steven, this seems to be a different issue than you had before. The log data suggests that the audio engine gets stuck somehow and Dorico can’t communicate with it anymore and therefore starts spinning. It looks like you usually work with 48kHz sample rate, but then in the log I see an event that the sample rate got changed from externally to 44.1kHz. This is where the trouble apparently started. Do you know, did you actively change the sample rate or use another audio program in between?
If you now can’t get Dorico going anymore, it’s most likely because of a zombied audio engine process in the background. Therefore, open the Activity Monitor and look for ‘VST Audio Engine’ and kill that process. Then start Dorico anew.

Ulf, thank you very much for the reply. This was indeed the case, I have been concurrently working on projects in Logic and Dorico with different sample rates. I’ll monitor that and try to keep the same rate across platforms. Thank you again!