Problem With Dorico 3.5 Pro Sounds Installer

So I’ve downloaded the free trial of Dorico 3.5 Pro, and have been able to install the download assistant and the actual Dorico app itself, but when I try to use the sounds installer, it brings me to the .zip file “Dorico_Pro_Content_Installer_win.zip”. Opening that brings me to “setup.exe”, which I can’t run. Double clicking gives me “Windows cannot complete the extraction. The destination file could not be created.”, and right clicking and pressing “Open” freezes the windows and I have to quit. How do I fix this? Thanks!

Try actually unzipping it / moving setup.exe to your harddrive. Don’t try to run it from inside the zip (Which should in theory work, but is often finicky, especially with low disk space or ram)

Yes, as Tyler suggests, make sure you unzip the installer before you try to run it, and also, try copying it to a folder in the root of your hard disk, e.g. directly inside the C: drive, because Windows has a path length limitation of 128 characters, and the paths created by unzipping the installer may end up too long. If you copy the installer into a folder in the root of your drive, you should find that it works reliably, and you can delete the installer and that folder as soon as the installation has completed successfully.

Thanks! This worked; I was hesitant to try to extract the installer because I thought it would mess up the installer somehow, but I extracted it with Bandizip, ran the setup program which worked, and checking the library manager showed all the sounds, and there is sound coming out of Dorico. Thanks again!

I encountered this problem just now, and I found that this:

was the key step. It seems that the path length limitation is in Steinberg’s installer, rather than the unzip utility: I used the already-unpacked folder that had not worked at its original location but did work at the root of C:\.

@dspreadbury , perhaps you all are aware of this already, but you can use much longer paths on Windows if you use more recent APIs. From Microsoft’s documentation:

The Windows API has many functions that also have Unicode versions to permit an extended-length path for a maximum total path length of 32,767 characters. This type of path is composed of components separated by backslashes, each up to the value returned in the lpMaximumComponentLength parameter of the GetVolumeInformation function (this value is commonly 255 characters). To specify an extended-length path, use the \\?\ prefix. For example, \\?\D:\very long path.

(Apparently I can’t include links in my forum post, but hopefully you can find the " Maximum Path Length Limitation" page.)

If the installer can be changed to use \\?\ paths, it may be possible to avoid this issue in future versions.

Welcome to the forum, Philip, and sorry that you ran into this problem. We are certainly aware of the Windows APIs that allow longer path names, but actually using them consistently is far from trivial, depending on the level to which those APIs are supported by all of the various dependent packages and toolkits we’re using. Nevertheless we are looking at an alternative way of delivering the sound content for future versions of Dorico that will avoid having to download, unzip and then run an installer: the sound content is already in compressed .vstsound files, so we are planning to make it possible to simply download them directly via Steinberg Download Assistant and then use Steinberg Library Manager to move them to the correct location. We expect to introduce this change along with the next major version of Dorico. (And unless we add new sounds, of course, no existing user will need to download the sounds again in any case.)