Hi there. Professional Finale user for 25 years; with the news of Finale ending and the opportunity to get a discount on Dorico Pro, I decided to take the plunge. Mac OS 12.7.6.
I downloaded everything and everything appeared to install correctly, but now Dorico won’t open at all. From the first attempt to open it, it was scanning my plugins. The problem there is that I have many McDSP and Slate plugins that I’ve let my subscription lapse, dozens and dozens of them. Each time I got the Quit or Activate screen for a plugin, I pressed Quit. I tried moving AU and VST and VST3 plugins to an _Unused folder, but that seemed to make things even worse, so I restored everything to their original folders.
Regardless, no matter what, Dorico won’t open. It doesn’t seem to be scanning plugins anymore, but it spends way too long on audio engine initialization, and then it’ll give me the message that it’s taking too long and I can either continue to wait or terminate, and then eventually I get the “Dorico cannot connect to the audio engine. The application will now quit” message. Not a particularly auspicious start for me. I’ve attached the diagnostics file in hopes that someone can help me at least get to the app’s desktop.
Dorico and the Audio Engine are two separate, but connected, beasts. If you terminate Dorico and the Audio Engine is still running/hanging, you will never be able to restart Dorico.
First, thanks for the reply! I’m kind of surprised myself that I was able to get that name!
Next, I can give that a try. However, I think I’m going to wait until tomorrow (Tuesday, 27 August). After 10 hours of working at my normal job, and then fighting with this program to try to get things working, my head can’t take much more today…
I’ll see about checking any hanging processes in Activity Monitor and see if that helps. For the record, I did restart the computer, since that’s my usual first operation in any computer puzzle…
I have heard good things about Dorico, even though I’m sure it’ll be a completely new workflow and I’ll need to kind of forget everything I’ve learned about Finale. I am looking forward to getting to know it — assuming I can actually get it to open! I’ll post again tomorrow and if needed attach another diagnostic.
Oh, actually, another question: I noticed that I now have a Steinberg folder in my Downloads folder. Is there a specific place I should put all that stuff?
Cleaning up expired plugins, moving some others based on your judgement to a different folder ( and NOT a sub folder under VST, etc. is a great idea. There have been times when one plugin or another was a problem.
Even so, it can take a good long while to scan then all the first time, and me having to click “do you want to continue” a few times hasn’t been unusual in times where I told it to reset and rescan them all. ( Something I rarely need, but sometimes I want it to forget everything if like you I stop using a vendor.
The Dorico audio engine is actually a separate process ( it’s the engine from Cubase) and it doesn’t always get terminated when Dorico shuts down abnormally. That is THE number one reason for what you describe. You can find and kill it easily enough, or best maybe this time is to do the cleanup you mentioned and then just reboot.
I promise - Ulf in particular (the audio guru at Steinberg) will get you past this one way or another- but what I mentioned has pretty good odds.
Decided to give it one more shot, with the same results. In Activity Monitor, I see Dorico; I don’t see anything resembling Cubase. I do see two AudioComponentRegistrar items, one assigned to me the other to root. That’s it, I can’t take staring at a computer any more tonight since I have a long day of work to deal with tomorrow. Regarding the unused plugins, I wish there were some sort of utility that could scan the plugins and allow unused/expired ones to be safely moved. To do it manually is really a chore, especially since not all of them are easily identifiable as to maker.
Not quite sure what I might have done; the installation itself was fine. It’s the fact that the program won’t open that’s causing me issues. I’m glad your situation was better than that.
So, not a bit of success yet. Every time I attempt to start the program, I see that it’s the Audio Engine step that’s tripping up the process:
It starts at 0s, then 10s, then after it says 20s I get the message about the program taking too much time, and do I want to keep waiting or terminate.
The VSTscanner seems to be crashing: if you’ve got loads of third-party VSTs, I’d suggest you remove them from /Library/Audio/Plug-ins/VST3 and then test adding them back.
Is your advice based on what was showing in the diagnostic file? In that folder, I’m seeing ~50 plugins, and nearly all of them are McDSP and Slate, two makers for which I let my subscription lapse. I can certainly remove those and put them in an unused VST3 folder and see what happens. I don’t know if a restart would be in order. I really can’t do that at the moment, since I’m logged into work. But this is definitely something to try.
Did you manage to get Dorico opening before - if only for the one time - but now it won’t open?
If so, it might be worth quitting Dorico and checking the Activity Monitor to see whether the VST Audio Engine is still present. If it is, you’ll need to stop that process as well. Dorico won’t load without that being done.
If that doesn’t help, Ulf (at Steinberg) is the guy to go to for Audio Engine etc. issues. Incredibly helpful and he will persist until he gets it solved for you.
Hi there. No, Dorico has not opened successfully yet. I’ve noticed that at the top of my disply I’ll see the Dorico menu bar, and it’s populated with various files to open in the File menu. But thus far, I haven’t gotten past that. However, just looking at Activity Monitor now, I do see that VST Audio Engine is active, though not hanging. I will close that and try again.
Yes, if you’ve got loads of VSTs that are perhaps trying to flag issues at startup (like not being licensed), then that’s definitely a problem. I’d try removing them and see if Dorico will then start up without a restart.
