VSTs that crash/freeze/timeout VSTAudioEngine

The first thing I did with Dorico was to add a player for Battery 4. Everything works > save > quit > load project.
Immediately, my first project would not load the audio engine. Troubleshooting determined Battery 4 timing out the VSTAudioEngine. If I clicked the ‘activate project’ it would crash 100% of the time.

Removing Battery 4 allowed the project to load normally. It was the most up-to-date VST3. Frustrated, I pushed on without that particular drum sampler, since I was in the midst of the Dorico learning curve, with this being my first project.

In other threads, I have read that Steinberg recommends reaching out to the VST devs (so not a Steinberg issue?), however I am scratching my head, because I’ve been a long-time Cubase user, and Battery 4 has always worked flawlessly.

This makes me reluctant to request a fix from Native Instruments - but does anyone at Steinberg have an explanation or recommendation?

One users case was that he had 3rd party Battery samples on an HDD, and the disk spin-up produced a hiccup causing VSTAudioEngine to appear frozen. Moving the samples to SSD solved his issue - but all my samples are located on an SSD.

Sorry, can’t help. Battery4 works fine here (Win10)

Upload your diagnostics (Help>Create Diagnostic Report) and perhaps @Ulf can see a problem.

1 Like

Thanks for confirming I must have a systemic issue.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (3.0 MB)

Thanks for the data, @Buluk .
Contained is only one dump file of the audio engine and this dump is special, because it is a freezedump. The audio engine throws such dump files, when it detects that the audio engine does not respond for a certain amount of time. So it is not crashing but rather hanging. It could even be, that it recovers by itself and continues running at a later stage. Loading this dump into the debugger shows, that it is hanging in Kontakt.vst3. So it might be that Kontakt has loaded Battery, but I can’t tell for sure. Is it maybe the case that Battery or Kontakt opened an error or alert window that is hidden behind the Dorico window? Could you please check on that? Thanks

Thanks for the help Ulf! No dialogue boxes/alerts in the past 2 weeks. Just hanging - I have left to do some gardening, to return and find that it is still hung up.
2 weeks ago when encountering the issue, I examined the dump, and found Battery was definitely hanging, and no alerts in that time.