Dorico is crashing frequently on my Windows 11 Sirface 9. It usually happens when I close a window – the hub is supposed to pop up, and it doesn’t. In Task Manager, I can see VST audio engine and Dorico running as background processes. If I kill both processes (or reboot), I can successfully restart the program. If I try to restart without killing them, it hangs on startup as it’s loading the audio engine … after 30 seconds it times out and asks if I want to wait or terminate. If I terminate, it says it couldn’t connect to the audio engine.
The problem seems to be worse if I try to use Finale (example – convert a finale file to xml, then open in Dorico). I suspect it has something to do with sharing the Garritan library and Aria player (Dorico found it automatically on installation). I don’t need to use the Garritan instruments in Dorico, but I still want them for Finale (at least until Dorico stops crashing).
Should add, also had some issues with the ASIO driver. Using Dorico would mess up the sound in Finale and Audacity (maybe because the Dorico audio engine was hanging in the background and tying up the sound card?) – installed and used ASIO4all as I read on several threads here, but it didn’t help with the crashing issue.
I’m frustrated. I invested 20-30 hours into learning Dorico last week. I’m starting to like it more than Finale already, at least in some ways, and I am ready to switch over. But I really need to be able to count on it to be stable – I use it during class, and I can’t be troubleshooting or reloading in my classroom while 20 middle school students twiddle their thumbs.
I’m sorry that you’re experiencing frustration. I can see that in the log files that the audio engine is hanging rather than crashing. It appears to be when a document is closed that things stop responding – is that what you are observing?
Unfortunately, the hang dumps haven’t been created (they are all zero-sized files). This isn’t a problem that I’ve seen before. There’s something that we can do to get a better dump file when it hangs, but before going into that, there’s something else we can do that hopefully will improve things for you, especially if you are switching between Finale and Audacity. I suspect this could also be the cause of the hang.
A little bit of background: your soundcard has two modes:
Exclusive, which means that the current application has total control over it, and it can use a lower latency (which is important when doing MIDI input)
Shared: which means multiple applications can use it at the same time, but with higher latency
Dorico’s audio engine tries to use Exclusive mode by default, as it’s the audio engine from Cubase (and in a pro audio app, you definitely want to use Exclusive mode for better latency). However, this isn’t the best setting if you want to switch between multiple audio applications. So what you can do is change a setting in Windows that means your soundcard won’t be opened in Exclusive mode. You just need to set this once. Watch the video from 12.23. Once you’ve changed this, hopefully Dorico would work better with either the Built-in ASIO device or ASIO4All.
We are aware of a crash that can occur when closing a project if you have something selected. That might not be what’s going on for you, but to make sure, type Ctrl+D to clear the current selection before you close the project, and see whether that helps.
I suspect a few of the crashes were of the “selection” variety so @dspreadbury thanks for that tip. And I made sure “exclusive control” was deselected both on the windows device page and on the generic ASIO driver in Dorico. I just successfully ran all three programs concurrently (Audacity/Finale/Dorico) and Dorico did not crash when I closed it. I’ll try it a few more times before declaring it solved, but looks like it might have done the trick.
Just had another audio engine hang on startup. This time, it successfully terminated the process itself (via the dialogue box that pops up after waiting 30 seconds), so when I tried again to restart, it was successful. I had Finale open the entire time. Dorico Diagnostics.zip (172.5 KB)
Have you tried changing the exclusive mode above? If you haven’t made that change then I would expect some issues if you are using Finale and Dorico at the same time.
@Ulf is emailing me about this at this point – the combo of deselecting exclusive mode in my Windows system sound options along with switching to the built-in Steinberg ASIO driver seems to be helping.
