I just took a break from scoring and put my Surface Pro into sleep mode. When I re-awakened it, it said that a USB device couldn’t be recognized. Since the only device plugged into my Surface was the dongle, I took it out and put it back in. Windows seemed to recognize it (device connected soundI. I then continued to write music without any problems.
After about 30 bars I wanted to do a save, but now Dorico gave me an error message that was obviously related to the dongle (something along the lines of “Product not activated”) and refused to save. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get Dorico to recognize the dongle. I tried copying the notes I had entered to the clipboard and pasting them into a new piece (which I could create no problem), but when pasting, Dorico crashed and had to be force-quit.
After a restart (and opening the file in the state of the last save), my last hope was to copy the notes from the clipboard. But Dorico seems to have cleared the clipboard on startup.
This is highly annoying. I understand the need for copy protection, but if it’s so flaky that it can’t tolerate a power-down and can’t recover from a situation where the dongle was removed for a second but reinserted immediately, and not even allows you to save your work in such a situation, that is extremely disappointing.
Oh, and even better: Now Dorico isn’t starting at all anymore, even with the dongle inserted. No error message, nothing.