Suddenly no audio export -- NotePerformer

Windows 10 PC, Dorico 4.1 (but not this week’s minor update), latest version of NotePerformer
I’ve been using Dorico & NP successfully for several months now, my main software while composing a larger orchestral work. Suddenly tonight, I ran into audio problems. I can no longer export audio copies of this work. Audio files of the proper length are created, but contain only silence. NP is still my default playback template, but it’s started to act flaky. Sometimes Dorico also produces no sound during playback (but not always); at that point, even switching to Halion does not restore sound
I’ve performed all the candidate solutions I’ve been able to find: reinstalled ASIO drivers, toggled Dorico playback templates, relaunched Dorico, rebooted the computer, etc. Everything short of reinstalling NP and Dorico from scratch.
What’s confusing is that the other projects I’ve created with Dorico & NP still play and export correctly. I suspect that I may have accidentally misconfigured NP in some unknown, but project-specific way, perhaps when the NP mixer popped up unexpectedly while I was typing. I’ve spent all night playing trying to reconfigure NP, even creating NP presets from working Dorico projects and loading them into my current project. No dice. In fact, sometimes the NP mixer doesn’t even appear until I close and reopen the project.
Losing this project would be catastrophic and although I back up every 24 hours, even losing today’s 14 hours of intricate editing would be a migraine. But just as important is figuring out what happened, to prevent this from happening again.
NotePerformer’s terse documentation identifies similar “no audio output” problems and offers a few solutions – such as those listed above – but as I mentioned, they failed to resolve the issue.
Has anybody run into this in the past and figured out what to do? At this point, I can’t even get Halion to make sound, so it’s not clear whether this is a Dorico issue or a NP issue – or both. I’m completely dead in the water.
Any ideas, short of reinstalling everything?
Thanks.
C

Can you send the project to me in a private message?

Under Device Setup, what ASIO driver are you using? What VST libraries? Are you running out of RAM?

Can you play the file on your computer but not export?

If so, which layout is at the top of the layout list in the righthand panel of Setup?

dspreadbury: Sure thing. I’ll have to bone up on how to send private messages, so give me a few minutes. Thanks!

Andro: I’m using the same ASIO driver for all my projects – both for projects that work and for my current projects (the ones that have stopped working). This is the driver bundled with my Meridian MQA USB audio interface. The only VST plug-ins installed are Halion SE (I just noticed that Halion Pro for some reason is not accessible from this copy of Dorico Pro) and NotePerformer64 (latest version). The machine has 32GB of RAM; one of the problematic projects is a smallish 50-measure, 7-instrument excerpt of the larger one, so I doubt if RAM is the issue.

Derrek: I can sometimes play the project on the PC but not export. Other times, I can do neither. But once the latter happens, it’s permanent until I reboot.

But, Derrek, I think you’re on to something. Yesterday I added and deleted a few instruments. The topmost layout is one that specifies only one instrument, one that was deleted from the project. I just deleted that layout – “Full Score” is back at the top-right in Setup Mode and is selected in Write Mode. After deleting the empty layout, I rewound the piece, as NP requires, before playing, but the symptoms did not change. The piece plays properly in Dorico, but exported audio files are silent. Still, you focused on a change that I made on the day that the problem arose, to the projects that are now symptomatic. That’s a big step in this debug procedure. I did hit the Reset button on the NotePerformer mixer after deleting the empty layout, btw, and the mixer disappeared. But it came back, looking correct, after reloading the project. Still no audio export, though…

Just so I can try to understand what’s going on, what is the significance of the order in which layouts appear in Setup?

In Dorico 4, there’s no significance to the order of the layouts in the Layouts panel when it comes to exporting audio: in previous versions, Dorico would use the first layout listed in the Layouts panel to determine which instruments should be included in the export, but in Dorico 4, it uses the current layout. So if you want to export audio of the entire ensemble, make sure the layout you’re looking at contains all of the instruments you want to hear in the exported file.

2 Likes

Update: As I just mentioned to dspreadbury in a private message, the problem has suddenly gone away. I rebooted the computer, changed default playback templates, deleted players, layouts, and instruments that were no longer being used, and basically tried everything else I could think of.

Nothing worked. Finally, after all that, I rebooted the computer one last time and the next time I launched Dorico, I was able to export audio normally. Perhaps one piece of software got so confused that it confused other pieces and it simply took repeated reboots and relaunches to get everything working at the same time. I dunno.

Regardless, I’m just happy to have Dorico back. I’m really starting to love its development environment. If anybody else runs into a similar problem in the future, I’d be glad to compare notes.

Thanks for all the helpful replies, everybody!

cundare (Don)