Old and new tech converge when using PDF Expert’s AI Copilot with notation software reference manuals

I’ll admit it: I’ve been reading music notation reference manuals for a long time.

In 1994 I remember taking the three volumes of the Finale 3.0 manual on a road trip and scouring the cross-referenced tomes for clues about what the Mass Mover did.

Eleven years later, in 2005, I found myself in the cafeteria of The Metropolitan Opera between rehearsals, making my way through the Sibelius 4.0 User Guide, chuckling at the witticisms sprinkled throughout: “When you have nothing better to do, this [moving a clef around] can provide hours of harmless (if rather limited) enjoyment.”

More recently, but still a long time ago in technological terms, in 2018 I celebrated the first release of the Dorico PDF reference manual. And when David MacDonald and I launched the Scoring Notes podcast, I was particularly pleased that within our first year we had an extensive conversation with Lillie Harris, the technical writer for that manual (in addition to being an accomplished composer and copyist).

Along the way, I’ve waxed rhapsodic about these impressively large and detailed documents, and in 2012 (yes, 12 years ago), marveled at the new technology known as iPad that allowed you to read the manual on a screen that you could hold in your hand, instead of in its earlier printed form.

The great detail contained in the reference manuals for notation software like Dorico and Sibelius comes at a cost, however. The Dorico Pro 5.1.40 Operation Manual clocks in at 1,923 pages; the Sibelius 2024.10 Reference Guide is svelte by comparison at only 837 pages — although that doesn’t include the 218 pages of the ManuScript Language Guide for Sibelius Ultimate.

No wonder many people these days don’t bother consulting these resources, and instead initiate their queries about how to use the software on Google, YouTube, or social media, often wasting lots of time. Even if you use the traditional tools in a PDF like a table of contents, index, and search, you’re still spending precious time looking for something that you might not even know the name of.

But don’t sound the death knell for these old-style “books” just yet. In fact, with the capability of artificial intelligence to ingest and analyze huge quantities of information, the reference manuals may again be the best — and quickest — source of information about how to use the software.

Here I’ll describe my brief experience with PDF Expert and its new Copilot AI assistant — still in beta, and only on Mac as of this writing — to wade through the Dorico and Sibelius references, and the encouraging results I encountered.

The first step: Getting the source documents

This is the easy part, if you know where to look.

The Dorico manuals and associated references are all available for quick download in PDF format from the Steinberg web site.

Similarly, you can find the Sibelius references in PDF format on the Avid site.

Downloading and saving those documents to your computer is all you need to do here to continue on to using them straight away in PDF Expert.

PDF Copilot in PDF Expert

AI-based PDF tools aren’t even that bleeding-edge anymore, but integrating them into the applications we routinely use is the next step. Earlier this year I reviewed PDF Expert, a reasonably-priced alternative to more expensive PDF applications, and described ways in which it integrated well into a music notation workflow, with its scanning and annotation tools.

Just a couple of weeks ago, PDF Expert rolled out PDF Copilot, integrating it into the application itself, with chat and contextual references included.

I had already been using a similar feature in Adobe Acrobat Pro, but that tool is limited to PDFs of 600 pages or less. That’s a reasonable limit for many documents. But not for the aforementioned notation software behemoths. PDF Expert’s Copilot has no such limitation, so I was eager to turn it loose on the mighty Dorico and Sibelius files.

Before we go any further, it’s important to note the following: Readdle, who makes PDF Expert, says that “PDF Copilot is not scanning your PDFs in the background. It will only process your files if you use the tool. Your data is not used for training models. You’re in control.”

One other note: PDF Expert’s Copilot is not the same product as Microsoft Copilot, or any other “Copilot”, as far as I am aware. It’s still early days to see where it goes, but the term “copilot” in both lower- and upper-case forms is something than many companies and products have used to describe their AI assistant, and on its own is not protected by trademark unless preceded by the company’s name. Thus, Microsoft Copilot, PDF Copilot, Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot, and the person helping fly your airplane all coexist but can be different from one another.

Opening a document in PDF Expert and initiating Copilot

When opening a document in PDF Expert, you’ll see the “ai” button in the menu.

Click on the button to begin processing the document.

Processing the Dorico and Sibelius manuals took a few minutes each, but it wasn’t a terribly long wait.

Once that’s done, Copilot presents you with some suggested queries, all of which seemed reasonable places to begin if you were brand new to Dorico or Sibelius.

Digging in

Now it was time to see if the bots could really take over.

I started with one of the most basic questions. How do I get the notes in? Or, more specifically: “What are the ways of inputting notes into Dorico?” and “What are the ways of inputting notes into Sibelius?”, respectively.

In both instances, I received useful information, along with internal links to the page numbers in each respective document from which the information was sourced, where I could click and read more.

I found it interesting that in both instances the first option was real-time MIDI keyboard entry, followed by manual note input with the keyboard and mouse, and then diverging to application-specific features (popovers for Dorico, Ideas for Sibelius). Keep in mind, though, with AI, it’s possible that you may get different results each time on the exact same query, unlike with a pre-programmed algorithm. The results weren’t totally comprehensive, but it’s a summary, after all — digging hundreds of pages deep in a matter of seconds.

Surely I could have gone down the road of asking PDF Copilot hundreds of questions. But, there’s a quota for now: I only have 200 “points” to use for the next couple of weeks. I haven’t looked into exactly how this is calculated, but I wanted to use this wisely.

So, I decided to up my game and combine the Dorico and Sibelius references into a single document to see what would happen next. I do love these reference manuals!

The next frontier: Comparing both applications

I actually combined the Dorico and Sibelius references using Acrobat Pro’s Combine Files feature, but you could do the same in PDF Expert using its Merge Files feature.

I don’t want to think about what the combined document would weigh if it were printed — it totaled 2,760 pages — but thankfully that wasn’t necessary. At approximately 92 MB, PDF Expert handled it just fine. This wasn’t anything fancy, just literally a document, the first part of which was the Dorico Manual, and the second part of which was the Sibelius Reference.

OK, first question. I stayed on the note input theme, but I wanted to know how the programs compared. “What are the differences and similarities between Dorico and Sibelius in the ways of inputting notes?”

PDF Expert correctly noted that both programs offer multiple input methods, with both step-time and real-time entry; it also correctly noted the popover-based design in Dorico, especially useful for experienced users, contrasting it with the Ribbon- and Keypad- based Sibelius design, concluding, accurately, that both were powerful applications with robust features, but with some different workflows.

Of course, these answers would come as no surprise to a regular Scoring Notes reader. But for someone new to the software and wanting to get a hot take? Score one for PDF Expert.

Now, the concept of “inputting notes” is something still in the realm of software-lingo. For my next question, then, I tried to unlearn 40 years of music education and ask PDF Expert something more basic: “How do I add text that tells the person what speed to play the music at?”

The answer made me feel like retiring from ever writing another Scoring Notes post. I don’t think I could have come up with a better answer here:

In addition to correctly identifying that I was asking about “tempo”, PDF Expert accurately noted the shortcuts used to enter such text and a brief summary of the procedure used in each application.

Next question: “How do I add more players to my piece?”

Again, PDF Expert delivered:

Of course, these are basic tasks that any notation software should document clearly, and any decent AI-based solution should be able to extract this information and present it accurately. But remember, I started out with those hefty printed Finale volumes in 1994, and after a dozen years of personally writing hundreds of articles of this nature on Scoring Notes, this still feels magical to me.

Leading the bot by the bit

There were times I needed to provide my AI companion with more leading questions. Even though AI promises contextual awareness and the supposed ability to understand follow-up inquiries, it didn’t always pan out.

Here, I asked PDF Expert, “I need to add a blank page for a page turn. How do I do that?” Having received the last few answers for both Dorico and Sibelius, I expected the same here, but only received an answer pertaining to Sibelius. After following up with “How do I do that in Dorico?”, PDF Expert ignored the most recent question about blank pages and instead harked back to the previous exchange about adding players to a piece:

Even so, as you can see, the Sibelius information was entirely accurate, so I prodded further with more specificity: “How do I add a blank page in Dorico?” This time, I got what I needed:

To be sure that PDF Expert knew I wanted to learn about both programs at once, for my next question, I specifically asked, “How do I change the music so it appears in the correct key for the player in Dorico and Sibelius?”

Again, these may seem like simple replies to the experienced user, but keep in mind that I didn’t use the word “transpose” or “score” in my question, yet PDF Expert knew exactly what I meant.

Moreover, PDF Expert importantly noted that “Both Dorico and Sibelius are designed to handle transposing instruments automatically.” I still see novice users — especially those who know their music theory and their transpositions but haven’t used notation software — trying to manually transpose the music for each instrument, like one might do when hand copying music.

Now that PDF Expert understood I was asking about both programs, I omitted that clarification from my next question for the sake of brevity: “How do l add the markings to tell the player to get softer or louder?”

Here, the results were interesting. Although PDF Expert correctly understood that I was asking about dynamics, and in both instances gave me some general information about adding dynamics, if I were a a new user to either program I think I would have been left scratching my head about how exactly in the software I do these things, and where I would find the referenced tools:

It’s possible, though, if I had followed up with a more specific question, I would have received a more detailed reply to that effect.

Nearly instantaneous results, but not always precise

Here are a couple of examples that demonstrate both the speed with which PDF Expert answered my questions, as well as what happened when I asked about some more technical aspects of the software.

For this first question, PDF Expert correctly answered my question, “Does Sibelius have anything equivalent to Dorico’s Flows?” as follows:

“No, Sibelius does not have a feature directly equivalent to Dorico’s ‘Flows.’ In Dorico, flows allow you to have multiple independent sections of music within a single project, each with its own separate content. This is particularly useful for projects like song collections, symphonies with multiple movements, or any project that requires distinct sections. Sibelius organizes music in a more traditional linear format without the concept of independent flows.”

That’s a pretty impressive answer that took only mere seconds for PDF Expert to formulate. This is what it looked like in real time:

A less successful query was when I asked, “Does Sibelius have a jump bar like Dorico?” I was hoping that PDF Expert would return an answer that included the Command Search feature in Sibelius, but it didn’t:

Even when prodded with the follow-up question, “What are those navigation and command execution methods in Sibelius?”, it didn’t recognize Command Search as a viable option, although it gave me some others.

This is probably less the fault of PDF Expert and more a result of the feature being inadequately documented in the Sibelius Reference; it’s buried on page 62 within a more general discussion of the Ribbon, and PDF Expert’s AI wasn’t able to make the connection between it and Dorico’s Jump Bar feature. To me, they’re similar, with quick keyboard access to many commands.

The future: An integrated approach

This last example illustrates a larger point. With the exception of Sibelius’s nascent chord symbol completion feature, we haven’t seen much use of AI in either of these programs. Who knows what the future will bring in terms of actual AI-based features; that’s a discussion for another time.

But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to take to get from the examples demonstrated above to an AI-based help approach that integrates the respective reference manuals directly into the software. Imagine, for example, within Dorico’s Jump Bar or Sibelius’s Command Search, the user could type a natural language question like I did within PDF Expert, and receive a helpful AI-powered reply in return. We’re already there with some other software and general internet searches.

Then, from that point, it’s really not much more of a leap to envision using AI to just tell the software what to do in natural terms, instead of asking how to do it and receiving instructions about the appropriate shortcuts and so on. “How do I add more players to my piece?” becomes “Add a clarinet, bass trombone, and extra percussionist,” and, oh by the way, “divide the violas from bars 45-54 and transpose the key a half step up beginning at the fourth verse” — tasks that are still squarely in the realm of music preparation, to say nothing of generating the actual music via AI.

When that happens, I probably will retire from writing Scoring Notes articles!

For now, though, I’m still here, and using PDF Expert‘s new Copilot feature is a very promising step. The ability to combine the Dorico and Sibelius references and return reasonable results was a fun and productive proof of concept. It’s one more reason this application will remain easily within reach for me. If you’re a Mac user, I recommend you give PDF Expert a try and see how this newly-introduced feature works for you, among the other more conventional reasons to use it in your music preparation workflow.