I’m on macOS 12.5. I launch Dorico (4.2.0.1092) almost daily. Sometimes it launches straight up no problems, within perhaps 15-20 seconds. (Still a long launch time, but bearable.) But other times it hangs for minutes, sometimes several minutes.
Sometimes I see a dialog box saying something convoluted about relaunching or quitting and blaming it on the Activation Manager. Sometimes I’ll quit Dorico, then the Activation Manager will be stuck at its “Loading, please wait…” screen for several minutes. Sometimes, if I’m impatient, I’ll force-quit, then relaunch the Activation Manager, and it’ll go all the way through quickly and appear totally normal – after being in a seemingly interminable hang just before.
This is getting to the point where Dorico feels very unreliable to me. Are there any known issue or known fixes for this?
(Side note: when I launch the Steinberg Download Assistant, it never actually tells me what version I’m running, or if I’m on the latest…seems like that would be a really basic and central thing that the app could tell me, that way if I’m running an older version and not the latest bug fixes, that could cure a problem like this…)
The Steinmberg Activation Manager (I understand) comes up on every launch of Dorico, but in most cases the Dorico screens come up so quickly that one does not notice the SAM screen.
Perhaps if one does not react immediately to the SAM screen, Dorico will load more smoothly.
That doesn’t seem to be true for me on Mac: SAM neither appears in the Dock, nor as a process in Activity Monitor when Dorico launches. The Steinberg Licence Engine starts up, and stays while Dorico is open.
You should also see a “Last Opened” date in the Finder preview column: if it’s not there, then the app hasn’t been opened since it was installed!
Daniel seems to say that SAM will start if Dorico thinks that there isn’t a licence, which may happen if the Licence Engine doesn’t ‘answer’ Dorico in time; but that’s not the expected normal behaviour.
Hi @user450, the next time you find that Dorico takes several minutes to launch, could you please wait until it has (finally) launched, then choose Help > Create Diagnostic Report within Dorico, and then either post the resulting report file in this thread or PM it to me, and I’ll take a look. Do you have a particularly unreliable internet connection? There is a known issue where the licensing engine will sometimes make network requests unnecessarily, and this can slow things down a lot if your internet connection is turned on but is slow. (If your internet is off entirely then this won’t happen.)
(Just a technical aside: the dialog with the Relaunch/Quit buttons that various people have mentioned is actually a Dorico dialog rather than SAM. If the licence engine is being slow to respond then you may sometimes see this dialog even when it isn’t strictly necessary: when Dorico first starts up it asks the licence engine for a licence, but until it gets a response it doesn’t know whether it has one or not.)
Just regarding the version number of Steinberg Download Assistant (hereafter SDA): it will update itself if required. When a new version is released, the next time you run SDA it will tell you that an update has to be downloaded, and won’t run on until it has updated itself. You can find out what version number you’re running by clicking the big About button in the top right-hand corner of the SDA window, which will show you its version number (and a few other version numbers, for eLicenser Control Center, Steinberg Library Manager and Steinberg Activation Manager, for good measure).
Unfortunately diagnostic reports won’t help us too much when diagnosing a hang: for that, we need the process samples created via Activity Monitor of both the Dorico process and the VST Audio Engine process. (If you can’t find a VST Audio Engine process, that most likely explains the hang: if the audio engine dies, Dorico is unable to save, because it expects to be able to receive information about the state of the plug-ins, etc., and if the engine isn’t there, Dorico will wait forever.)
If you have what looks like a hang on startup, while trying to get a licence, then the diagnostics file might be useful as without it it’s hard to tell which licensing operation is taking a long time - there are quite a few different processes involved so this is not obvious. The diagnostics file is also useful if you have a crash as it will contain any crashlogs related to Dorico. However, if you have a hang once Dorico is up and running then the diagnostics file is typically a lot less useful, and that’s when the process samples that Daniel mentions are more helpful.