Download assistant horribly broken; won't auto-update

[larry.schrof]

Folks, I’m a professional musician, interacting with 50+ other professional musicians and educators / week. I am just about at the point where I can no longer in good faith recommend Dorico (or any Steinberg products if they have a similar problematic installer / updater history) to my colleagues.

For the past couple of months, the Steinberg Download Assistant would keep erroring when attempting to download the latest Dorico Pro update, which at the time was 5.1.80. Very frustrating, but theoretically I could download the full Dorico installer from another location on the site. Which apparently requires a full un-install then re-install of the new version. I gotta’ tell ya’ - I get nervous uninstalling an app just to try to hope the reinstall works after all the general install / update issues I’m seeing.

But now it gets even worse…

Just now, I attempted to run the Steinberg Download Assistant. It tells me it can’t run until it updates itself. And then, 100% of the time, an error occurs right away and the only option is to exit the download assistant auto update process.

So… what are my options at this point? I’d like to get the Download Assistant working, but even if I could, it never seems to be able to pull down the latest Dorico update without some unknown fatal error, so…

Anyone else having these kinds of problems on Windows 11?

I’m happy to submit any debugging info needed, but I’m legally blind and it would take me a lot of time to find and parse all of the guidelines on bug submissions.

Thanks for any assistance. Overall, this experience has been a very poor one. Dorico itself is fantastic. The process to keep Steinberg software updated (in my case, only Dorico Pro is owned) has been absolutely horrible.

[asherber]

The update process has obviously been working fine for most users, but some have reported issues.

You can try downloading the latest version of the Download Assistant from this page; maybe that will unblock you.

Steinberg - Creativity First

You don’t say what error you’re getting – does this post apply to you?

Steinberg Download Assistant error when installing Dorico 5.1.81

Please see here for the solution: Read and follow the steps carefully. You will very likely need to add the line: aria2c.disableIpv6=true to the application.properties file, as it won’t be there. Don’t assume that because it’s not there, you don’t need to add it – you do. If after changing this hidden configuration option, quitting and restarting SDA, you still encounter the error, delete the Steinberg folder inside your Downloads folder, and delete the download state file SDA_downloads.js…

[rubberfingers]

I had the same problem today. But now I forget how I solved it… Justing letting the team know it’s not a robust process. Fortunately I’m pretty computer-savvy and have been using Dorico since version 1.

[larry.schrof]

Thanks for the quick response!

I’ll try downloading the latest SDE as you suggest. If that doesn’t work, I’ll take a look at that post. Unfortunately it’s late for me so I will jump on this in the morning and update here. Thanks again!

[Paul_Fowkes]

The whole Steinberg updating process is a shambles if you ask me: frequent failures, lots of different manual workarounds etc. Has been like it for a long time, don’t know how they get away with it to be honest

[HeiPet]

This is not my experience. The SDA is not up-to-date, but is doing what it is asked to do. At least I didn’t have to do any manual workarounds …