615: Sibelius crashes when doing File > Save As or saving a PDF from the Print dialog

Symptoms

Some users have experienced Sibelius crashing when saving a score for the first time, or when choosing File > Save As, or when trying to use Save as PDF in the File Print dialog.

This problem affects only Sibelius 6, and only occurs on Mac OS X 10.5 or later. It does not affect all computers.

Cause

At this time, unfortunately, the underlying cause of this problem is not known. We are actively working with Apple to resolve this problem, but as yet we do not know what causes the crash.

The crash occurs in Mac OS X system code, typically either relating to the showing of the system file management dialogs, in particular Save As. It appears that the crash is related to specific network devices or types of network devices being present on your local network.

Workaround

The recommended workaround for this problem is to update to Sibelius 6.2.

Sibelius 6.2 introduces a workaround that avoids the circumstances in which the application can crash: before a system Open or Save dialog is opened, any loaded samples in the Sibelius Player are unloaded, and the samples are then reloaded once the system dialog has been closed. This workaround is only enabled if Sibelius detects a crash caused by this problem, which it does by creating a temporary file before opening the Open or Save dialog, and then deleting it once the dialog has closed; Sibelius checks for the presence of this file when it starts up, and if it finds it, it therefore knows that the program crashed while opening the Open or Save dialog, and enables the automatic unloading of sounds.

This workaround is not enabled by default so as to avoid the performance penalty of reloading sounds for those users whose computers are not affected by crashes, and those users whose computers are prone to crashes will only have to endure a single crash before Sibelius then applies the workaround automatically.

How you can help

Sibelius will now offer to upload any crash logs it finds on your system to our servers to help us improve the software. No information that could be used to identify you other than the contents of the crash logs themselves is transmitted. You can opt out of having crash logs sent to our servers when Sibelius asks you.

We would like to collect as many crash logs as possible from our customers to help demonstrate to Apple that this issue requires further attention from them.