My playback in Dorico 5 started cutting out randomly. I can’t find anything wrong with how my hardware is set up. I was not having this problem until about a week ago. I found something about a buffer slider but it doesn’t exist in the Device Setup dialog box. It didn’t matter which device I selected for playback, whether it was my speakers or my headset. How do I fix this?
What settings have you tried in the Device Control Panel dialog?
I’m not sure I can recall all of what I tried, this setting seems to have reduced it quite a bit, it still cut out a few times when I played a 5 piece composition that runs ~5 minutes
How about if you reduce the sample rate to 48000 Hz instead of 96000?
Doubling the sample rate puts a lot more strain on your cpu and it becomes more likely for drop outs. Especially, most sound libraries got sampled at 48000 Hz and playing them back at 96000 Hz does not improve the sound quality at all. It’s just a waste of CPU cycles.
Dropped it to 48000 Hz, still cutting out randomly
Does your SteelSeries Sonar device have an own dedicated ASIO driver?
If you don’t know, please make a screenshot of the drop-down list of ASIO Drivers. You know what I mean?
It’s a SteelSerieds headset that has a software driver that includes media, gaming, chat…
But - I still have the same issue regardless of whether I set the output to the headset, or my Yamaha speakers through a Yamaha sound board that has a cheap Behringer USB interface in front of it (and it wasn’t doing this until about a week ago, it was working fine for months).
I’ll have to type the list of ASIO drivers since my keyboard doesn’t have a printscreen key and when I bring up the snippet tool the drop down closes back up.
AE 30 (that’s for my Roland Aerophone)
ASIO4All v2
Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver
Realtek ASIO
Steinberg Built-in ASIO Driver
I see, thank you.
What if you change to the Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver, does that drop audio in the same way and rate?
That made everything go wacky. I had to check “Allow ASIO…” just to be able to select the headset and no sound when I try playback. On a side note, my PC handles AAA video games all the time fairly well, it seems strange that Dorico playback would nail my CPU anywhere near as hard as the video games I play all the time.
This is not getting anywhere close to maxing out my CPU
… and .. this time I played it all the way through and it didn’t cut out at all. I have no idea what I did that may have fixed the issue. I’ll try again several times over the next few days and see if it’s consistent. I’m baffled.
That is truly surprising.
How about the ASIO4All driver? Same wacky behaviour?
Furthermore, I’d like you to get the utility LatencyMon and see what that says.
It’s a real-time audio suitability checker and you just let it run along with Dorico playing back.
https://www.resplendence.com/download/LatencyMon.exe
I’m really curious what that will tell us.
Btw, it is not uncommon that graphics drivers can interfere with the audio performance,
especially NVIDIA drivers have a bad reputation in that regard.
I tried a big band composition this time and LatencyMon shows this while I played it. It was cutting out again.
I don’t know if I’m thinking of this right, but it looks like power throttling is already disabled specifically on Dorico and I’m concerned about messing with global settings like this that may impact other applications I use.
First of all, the screenshot of LatencyMon looks okay, so if it is always like that, then I see no problem. More interesting though is, how do the bars look like in the moment when audio is cutting out?
Furthermore, I see that you also have an NVIDIA graphics driver, have you already checked that you have the latest one for your environment?
Lastly, when it comes to playback, Dorico is not so heavily involved. What you need to look out for is the VSTAudioEngine process. Dorico just sends MIDI data over, and it’s the VSTAudioEngine that has the heavy duty task to generate a continuous audio stream out of that. Recently I found here a very good source of knowledge of how to tweak settings for good audio performance.
One of the steps I did was to update to the latest NVIDIA driver, there was an update, it didn’t make a difference after I installed it.
The bars were jumping around too randomly for me to decipher anything consistent when the audio cut out.
I’ll look at your link for tweaking audio settings
In a nutshell I did some of what was shown from that video link. A lot of it is stuff that looks too risky. The issue with Dorico playback is the same - bad. I tried exporting to mp3 and played that with no issues. I also opened up Finale and played the same composition where it was ~90% finished before I exported to MusicXML, imported it to Dorico and finished it there. Finale playback has zero issues with cutting out sound.
This leads me to believe that Dorico’s use of the VSTAudioEngine or VSTAudioEngine itself needs to be optimized, I don’t see how we can blame NVIDIA for this.
For the time being, I’ll use exporting to mp3 as a workaround, I’m going to need to send audio files to musicians I’m going to be rehearsing my material with to help them prepare their parts ahead of time.
Well, the VST Audio Engine gets constantly worked on and improved.
Anyhow, I’m interested in your case and want to find out more
Could you please do from Dorico’s menu Help > Create Diagnostic Report and send me the corresponding zip file.Thatk you very much.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (753.3 KB)
I did this while it was playing. Before that it did get a playthrough without any issue, then I tried it again with LatencyMon running and it cut out a bunch again. I tried another run in Finale and it stayed consistent with no issues. What’s really strange is that this didn’t start happening until after I had to reassemble my desktop, but I haven’t been able to find anything I did wrong with that. Help/About shows the last update on 1/16/2025. I see projects as late as 2/17/2025 in my folder where I store all of them, so maybe I put off downloading the latest Dorico 5 patch past a month & a day (just a wild guess if the latest patch impacted anything)?
Thanks for the diagnostics.
I’m wondering, how about your HALion Sonic setup? Are you switched on for multiprocessing?
If you switch Multiprocessing on, does the situation change?
I’m struggling just to find this. I tried googling how to get to the dialog you’re showing and I got this:
So I get to the layout options and whether I select one from the Layout list or all of them, there is no Halcyon section when I scroll all the way down and all the way up.