Dorico 1.1 Random Hanging

Greetings all.

Has anyone besides myself having an issue of random hanging with Doric 1.1? Never used to be a major issue for me until the update.

I can be working and then everything pretty much freezes, though sometimes I can hear notes being activated as I’m clicking around the score trying to breathe life into it, but nothing gets selected. When I quit, it always asks me if I want to save, so thus far I haven’t lost anything except time.

Cheers,
Dave

Dave,

Could you be experiencing the known bug described here?

If so, the good people on Daniel’s team are already aware of it and working to find the cause - and fix it.

I get it all the time and am hopeful that it’ll be fixed in the small update which seems to be imminent.

Mark,

Thanks for that - it seems to be the problem. I neglected to mention that I too am on a Mac, which seems to be the affected version.

I’ll try a few of the temporary fixes mentioned in the other thread and just wait it out.

Thanks again,
Dave

Dave,

It seems to be affecting a lot of users - but not all on Macs, which ought to make it easier to fix. Good luck!

Unfortunately this bug will not be fixed in the forthcoming small update, despite our best efforts. We have not yet managed to isolate and fix it.

Thank you, Daniel. I know you appreciate how important it is to fix - good luck.

Has any progress been made with this major bug, does anyone know?

Is it a top priority?

The fact that so few people seem - at least here - to be reporting it and/or asking about it suggests that it doesn’t affect everyone. Surely that says something?

So intrusive is it (I’ve counted - and it seems to be rendering about two sessions out of three almost impossible to continue with when trying to write anything because alternating back to Write after Play isn’t guaranteed and further degradation is almost always inevitable) that some of us must have (combinations of) circumstances which make it more likely to occur than others. Could those be identified in helping to fix it as a matter of urgency, please?

Is there something that we can do to try and nail it down, please?

In full support of everything that the team is doing… :slight_smile:

I hope that it is high priority because it’s almost impossible to work under these circumstances.
I was working on a new mass but it got really frustrating. :frowning:

Thanks, ReiRei - as a programmer I know how hard it can be to track down elusive bugs such as this.

I also know that Daniel and the team are fully aware of it and as annoyed by it as we are - and committed to fixing it.

Just that, as you say, it does make some sessions almost impossible to complete.

It seems so random - comes and goes in sequences: two or three hours without it. Then five relaunches in a row!

Maybe the developers have some way of logging the Playhead progress to try and see which other sets of states of variables are present when it occurs; and which not?

I know that switching modes sometimes helps; but in my experience not for long; nor does that guarantee that other runaway instability almost always results… note input clobbered, other screen redraws compromised etc.

If we can help in any way (debugging traces, diagnostics, questions on exact circumstances…), we’re ready! :slight_smile:

Thanks!

Hi Mark,

let’s hope the best for the near future. The team is very busy and capable.

There was an exchange in another thread, which didn’t belong there - my apologies for hi-jacking it :frowning:

The essence of the exchange was as follows:

I changed the buffer size (in Edit > Device Setup) from 256 samples to 1024.

Unfortunately, after writing a couple of bars and started playing (NUM + . > Space) in Write mode, the display froze immediately.

Paul replied that the Steinberg team hasn’t seen it go wrong as soon as playback starts. When they see it, it happens after a couple of minutes, if at all. I confirmed that I have no applications that do things like draw into application windows or do screen capture.

All of this makes me wonder whether there may be some specific other application (Mac and PC) which is running at the same time as Dorico and which is causing the bug to appear - since it’s obviously not happening all the time to everyone, or there would be many more mentions of it here on this forum.

??

I notice that you have a 5K iMac, so I wonder if screen resolution has an impact? Mine is a non-retina macbook.

Do you still have the problem if you turn off the options to Follow playhead during playback and Show playhead when stopped?

Paul,

Yes - it’s a retina display.

Is there any way to poll those who’ve also reported the phenomenon (here) and see what their hardware is?

Although since it’s present on PCs as well, that may not be relevant.

Yes - both those options cause it to happen; and when it has, cause subsequent decay.

Thanks!

Well we’ve only had a single report of it on Windows (though that suggests that it could be a Qt issue), and we’ve never seen it happen in-house. I don’t know of any way of setting up a poll on here though.

If the one report on Windows is verifiable, that would help, wouldn’t it?

These links might help with polls, if it’d be useful to get a sense of how widespread the phenomenon is, and who’s experiencing it:

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=1025395

Maybe even ask explicitly to see if it’s only one or two of us; and the rest - for whatever reason - never get it. Or, if they do, do the switch modes routine that Daniel has advised and move on.

Thanks in any case for working so hard - at this, as with everything!

I’m routinely getting the program to hang. It might have something to do with editing, then playing, then editing, etc. Soon enough, editing stops working. Playback is often erratic, with volume fluctuations in a single-voice piece with no dynamic markings. And as remarked elsewhere, the green marker goes away. But mainly, note selection and editing just stop, or become unusably slow.

Just a guess, but the relatively slow and gradual onset of the hanging, and the link between the editor and the player, makes me think there’s a memory allocation problem, bad garbage collection, etc.

Some of the posts indicate the developers can’t reproduce the problem? Try inputing a few bars from the keyboard, play them, input more, play, edit etc. 50 bars, as if you’re really using the program. It always shows up, but not immediately, usually within 15 minutes.

Is it possible to move back to version 1.0? This version 1.1.10.202 is not really usable. I’m on a Macbook Pro, retina screen, ver 10.12.6. I hate to go back to Sibelius but I might have to .

That might make it fail consistently for you personally, but I think if it failed that way for every Dorico user, this forum would have hundreds or thousands of people complaining, not just a handful.

It certainly makes life difficult. Though it seems as though it’s a top priority for the team.

It is just so random. I sometimes have it on the first attempt to play (in Write mode); at other times, I can go for minutes - even longer - without.

Then, sometimes it’ll never happen again; other times after multiple successive relaunches.

Some might stop wasting time and just go back to Sibelius. Like me.

May I respectfully suggest that this really isn’t a very helpful post?

I suspect that the majority of us are confident that the team will track it down, annoying though the bug certainly is.

Meanwhile, what’s been achieved with Dorico until now is nothing short of remarkable!