Note Performer 3.2 problems

  1. Its for a while now that every time I open Dorico the playback is not working,
    clicking on a note does not sound, and starting playback lets Dorico go not responding.
    This does not depend on the complexity of the scores I open.
    The workaround I found is: open the project but do not start playback, instead select a different layout,
    save, close dorico, restart dorico (wait a bit, to avoid a “audio engine died” hang on startup), reload the score:
    sound is there, and you can switch back to the initial layout without problems.
    But it’s quite a time consuming procedure…

  2. NP started suddenly to interpret a Piano as a transposing instrument, and played back every
    note a diminshed 5 too low … The rest of the instruments kept their pitch…
    That indeed sounded very wrong! :confused: :angry: :open_mouth: :laughing:
    Restart cleard the problem, but today it came back a second time. I hope, it won’t get permanent
    like point 1)

Sometimes I think of a complete and clear reinstall of Dorico and everything, because
I apparently I do have less problems when I have to work whith Dorico on my laptop.
But I don’t know if a unistall via windows systemsteuerung will clear and wipe really everything.

My suggestion, Ulf, would be to do Play > Playback Template and re-choose the ‘HSSE+HSO (Pro)’ or ‘NotePerformer’ playback templates, which will clear any saved audio engine data from the project and reset everything. If you find that doesn’t help, you could also try deleting the VSTAudioEngine2_64 folder in %APPDATA%\Steinberg, which will cause the audio engine itself to start afresh with factory settings.

Hi Daniel, thank you for your useful hints.

  • First way does not work (I already tried this before a lot).
  • The second way (deleting the folder) works, but does not solve the problem in a “sustainable” way.

It seems, at the moment I have to delete the folder every time before I start Dorico after boot to get the
sound engine working. At least a lot quicker then my old workaround!
(In the old times I would have added a delete command in my autoexec.bat…)

Without deleting the folder before opening a Dorico project, I get:

  • no sound when selecting a note
  • on start playback it gets non responsive
  • dorico can be closed via the main window’s close icon; it closes without any error message.
  • but then Dorico will not start again
  • audio engine folder cannot be deleted, because it’s “in use”
    (Before I deleted the folder for the first time, the behaviour was a bit different: there was a report sent to microsoft, and
    dorico could be started again.)

One problem is, there was and there is no crash dump written on this.

That sounds all weird. When the audio engine folder can not bet deleted, then the engine is still running and did not close down properly. You could check via the Task Manager and kill the process VSTAudioEngine2 manually.

Still, this is all strange. Would you please do Help > Create Diagnostic Report from the Dorico main menu? That will create a zip file, please send to ‘u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de’.