I love many of the features of Dorico and prefer using this software for writing score, however it frequently crashes. Each time I’ve taken the opportunity to submit the crash dump file. Usually the application closes peremptorily, but sometimes stops responding before subsequently closing. I noticed occasionally the Vienna Synchron players are left running.
Does the team have any general advice for avoiding Dorico crashes?
Also: why doesn’t the software handle exceptions and allow the application to continue functioning? It might alleviate frustration to know why, and even help to avoid the circumstances in which it happens.
Context: I recently retired as a software developer/technical architect and started composing in earnest using Dorico 5, Cubase 12, mainly Vienna Synchron (but also BBCSO Pro and Kontakt 4) on a PC with i7, 16GB RAM, M.2 SSD, Windows 10, Focusrite Scarlett Solo.
Thank you for the advice, lafin.
I imagine the devs at Dorico/Steinberg can’t give specific guidance without accessing my diganostics.zip. However, I’ve examined the content of this file and feel that posting it publicly on this forum is exposing too much information about my file system, email addresses etc. (It may seem to be innocuous data but we need increasingly to exercise caution.) So I would be prepared to forward the zip to a dev at Dorico/Steinberg, but not upload it here.
The specific exception in the latest crash is: “ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000374 - A heap has been corrupted.” It occurred when:
I selected a single absolute tempo change in the Key Editor.
I held down the up-chevron to increase its value (i.e. to take it from 132 to 156.)
After increasing the value by perhaps 3 or 4, the crash occurred.
This might be sufficient information to diagnose this problem and there might in fact be a bug. I would be happy to post about specific issues in other threads going forward, and I have encountered some. However, my question here was rather more general.
For the avoidance of crashes, the team might for example advise against holding down a value incrementor/decrementor (UI control) or any other such thing. I’d like to know what the dev team considers risky user actions, if they have any thoughts on that.
And my question about exception handling is something I’d like to explore. Is the application written in C++, and can every exception by caught or are there some that simply cannot?
You could use the Direct Message option to send the diagnostic report directly to Daniel Spreadbury. Find a message from dspreadbury and click on his name/avatar to access the Message button.
Be sure to reference this thread so he will know why you sent the diagnostic report.
Sorry to hear you’re experiencing crashes, Michelle. Please feel free to send your diagnostics to me, either in a private message by clicking on my name above this post and then clicking the big Message button in the pop-up that appears (provided you have a sufficient trust level on the forum to send direct messages). If you can’t do that, you can email them to me at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de. If the zip file is big (which it can be on Windows due to the size of the mini-dump files), please use a service like WeTransfer.com to send it to me.