First day using Noteperformer. When I went to close the file I got the spinning beach ball. Force Quit, and now Dorico won’t open—can’t connect to audio engine. I tried uninstalling NotePerformer—still no dice. Can someone help? (On Mac Sequoia silicon.) Thanks-Peter
Never mind… restarted my computer and it’s working again. 
The problem you’re facing is that for some reason, the audio engine (which is a separate app from Dorico) is stuck and has not quit. Open Utilities>Activity Monitor, and kill VST engine (which should appear as stuck)
Relaunch Dorico after that (leave 5 s to make sure everything is in order before you relaunch Dorico) and it should start.
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… which would explain why my restarting my computer fixed the problem. Thanks—this is exactly the info I was looking for! Since it could happen again…
Killing the VST Engine used to work for me (happens frequently), but no longer. Now, if I kill the VST Engine, when I start up Dorico again I get: “Launching Steinberg Activation Manager” and a prompt to Relaunch or Quit. Relaunch doesn’t seem to do anything, and I manually launched it and signed in again, but that didn’t help - Dorico still waits on the VST engine, and Activation Manager says “An unknown error occurred while connecting to the Steinberg License Engine. Please restart your computer and try again.”
Restarting does fix it, but I don’t want to have to do that every time this happens.
Hi @StephenWeatherford , it sounds as if you can easily reproduce that error scenario, correct? Could you please take a spindump (via Activity Monitor) when the beach ball is spinning and if you have Dorico running again, also do from the menu Help > Create Diagnostic Report. The corresponding zip file post here please, along with the spindump.
If you need more detailed instructions, please ask.