With all my Dorico files, since 4.1, playback stops working after I open and then close another Dorico file. The playback switch is being turned off, and when I turn the playback switch on again, the playback controls stay greyed out and are not working. The workaround is to close and re-open the project in which playback stopped working, but the disadvantage is that it disrupts my flow and that I lose my undo history. Both ‘Project activation’ settings in the Playback preferences are set to ‘Always’.
After you re-activate the project, you need to wait while the sounds are reloaded; depending on which playback template you’re using, this could be a few seconds or much longer. These days I tend to have Dorico automatically activate the first project, but then only activate the second project on demand as and when I need to play it back. This also has the advantage of minimising the time it takes to switch between the open projects, which will perhaps also help to reduce any interruption to your workflow.
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Hi Daniel, thank you for your time. I think there are 2 things going wrong in my case:
- I didn’t switch off playback in the other project before opening the new one, so shouldn’t it automatically reactivate the playback of the old project when I close the new one and the old one gets focus again?
- I tested it and waited for minutes after clicking the activate playback button, but really, it doesn’t re-activate it. When closing and re-opening the same file it takes only a few seconds for Dorico before the playback activation succeeds.
If you have both projects set to be activated, then you don’t need to manually deactivate or activate them: you just have to wait after switching windows for the audio engine to load all the sounds and report to Dorico that it’s finished. However, I can see that our testing team have flagged something up that could be responsible for the behaviour you’re seeing, so we’ll take another look.
Good to hear that, thanks!
If that’s still useful @dspreadbury I can also reliably force a crash after this happens by turning the playback on, then off, and then on again (4.1.10). Diagnostic report attached.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.8 MB)
Unfortunately, no crash logs are included in your diagnostics, Maarten.
I’m sorry, Dorico just hangs indefinitely, it doesn’t quit… I didn’t know that it doesn’t create a crash log in that case.
But with experimenting more, I also found a way to successfully restart the playback! Just by clicking the playback activate button (after which it doesn’t really activate the playback, as said in the opening post), and then de-activate it again using the same button and just wait. Then, after a few seconds, it just activates itself!
For others who may have this problem, it looks like this:
I find with 4.0 that if I try to change things while Dorico is busy configuring playback, it can hang the whole application and require a force quit. If not that, sometimes playback doesn’t work until I quit and relaunch. I have learned to wait for the playback “power” button to light up before touching things. And it’s very useful that Dorico offers not to activate playback when you open a file on top of one that’s already active.