Dorico 1.1 Random Hanging

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!

For what it’s worth, I have been really working with Dorico these last ten months, I have a MacBook pro late 2013 with retina screen and a bunch of SSDs, running El Capitan, and NEVER experienced this bug.

Given that it appears to be related to QT, it couldn’t (also) have to do with OS, could it?

That’s why I gave you that information!

Thanks, Yes, Marc :slight_smile:

I don’t believe we’ve heard from Steinberg that there is any established correspondence between OS (or even platform) and the QT redraw anomaly, have we?

I do not known. Yet I think it is quite important for them to have as many information as possible to be able to understand the conditions where that bug appears. As I never experienced it, I guess describing my system is all I can do to help…

Note: I’m talking about ‘Qt’ (the application framework) not ‘QT’ (QuickTime). Our best guess at the moment is that it’s a Qt bug, or even an OS bug. It’s also a ‘Heisenbug’ in that any attempt to try to observe it by attaching the debugger causes it to no longer occur. I appreciate how frustrating it must be for you, but please also remember how frustrating it is for us that it’s really difficult to reliably reproduce it, and if we can’t reproduce it then we don’t know if any one thing we do will fix it!

Marc - that’s right - it’s useful for us to know on whose machine it occurs and whose it doesn’t. Maybe we’ll then start to see a pattern emerge. I’ll kick things off:

Machine: Macbook Pro 15" 2012
OS: 10.12.2
Screen: 15" non retina
Running on battery or external power: both
Any screen capture, window extensions or video software: no
How reliably does the playback freeze occur: sporadically. When it does happen it’s usually after playback has been running for a couple of minutes
Does switching to a different mode and back fix it: yes. Even just scrolling the view is enough

Thanks so much, Paul!

Machine: ‘Late 2014’ Retina 5K iMac
Hardware: 4 GHz i7; 32 GB RAM
OS: 10.12.6
Screen: 27" retina
Running on battery or external power: external
Any screen capture, window extensions or video software: no
How reliably does the playback freeze occur: sporadically. Can be any time from immediately and after a machine cold boot to four hours in
Does switching to a different mode and back fix it: not always. Scrolling the view never does. Further degradation (inputting notes, editing etc) usually follows

Well, if you have such a low opinion of the Dorico developers that you don’t believe they ever “just run the program for 15 minutes”, you probably shouldn’t even consider using it for anything serious! But other people might not share your opinions.

In fact some of the Dorico team also use the software regularly, outside of “working for Steinberg”, as composers, arrangers, editors, performers, etc.

Avid went through a phase of hiring subcontractors for software development from anywhere around the world, so long as they were cheap. But even if Avid eventually learned the hard way that “you get what you pay for”, they don’t have the option of going back to the original development team any more :wink:

It is our impression that the screen redraw problem is more common on Sierra (i.e. macOS 10.12) than it is on earlier versions of macOS, but unfortunately I don’t think it is true to say that the problem doesn’t occur at all on older versions of macOS.