Today Steinberg announced details about Dorico, the music scoring software more than three years in the making. It will be available for Mac and PC computers in the fourth quarter of 2016. Pricing will be 579 € including VAT, or $579.99 for US customers, for a full professional license. Educational pricing for qualifying teachers and students will be 349 € including VAT ($349.99 USD), and a crossgrade offer for qualifying Sibelius and Finale users will be available for 299 € including VAT ($299.99 USD) for “a limited time”.
Valerio Dorico was one of the first music printers in Rome in the 16th century. In introducing the product at the MOLA conference in Helsinki this past weekend, Steinberg product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury said that “originally Dorico was the code name for the program, but in time we failed to find a better name for the program, and the name stuck. However, please don’t pronounce it like the name of a corn chip! The emphasis is on the first syllable: DO-ri-co.”
In a press release, the company paid homage to the history of music printing: “Dorico’s graphical output is intended to uphold the centuries-old craft of fine music engraving, with attention to even the smallest of details. Taking every subtlety into account, Dorico aims to fulfill the aesthetic demands of the most discerning engravers and publishers, providing extensive capabilities for graphical tweaking and editing.”
Last year, Daniel described the five modes of the program: Setup, Write, Engrave, Play, and Print, which he says are “roughly divided up according to the different phases of working on a given project. In each mode, collapsible panels down the left- and right-hand sides of the screen, and in most cases also along the bottom too, show the main interface elements for creating and editing your music.” So we’ll begin a tour of what we know about Dorico by briefly exploring each of those modes, and then move on to other items and initial impressions.
It’s worth mentioning that no one in the audience at the May 15, 2016 demonstration, including myself, has actually used Dorico for themselves yet; the features described herein are based on information gleaned from demonstrations of the product and explanations by Daniel.
Setup mode
The key concepts of Setup mode are:
- Players: humans holding one or more instruments
- Instruments: flute, oboe, guitar, piano, etc.
- Flows: self-contained spans of music, such as a song, movement, piece, act or number
- Layouts: contain the music for one or more players, from one or more flows
A key difference between Dorico and its primary competitors such as Sibelius or Finale is that it is organized around players instead of instruments. “Who is playing the music? The program is designed around that concept,” Daniel said. This avoids the problem of having to add, and then hide, unnecessary staves in the case of doubling instruments, for instance. Daniel said that “staves in Dorico are transitory things; the program creates them as needed.”
In Setup mode, you first create the player and then add to it, for example, a Flute and a Piccolo. A player can be a single person or a section (e.g. for a violin or choir section):
A more clever use case of players as effective “containers” for instruments is in the case of percussion parts. In setting up a score in Dorico, one would add each percussion instrument separately. Once players decided upon assignments, one could assign those instruments to each respective player.
A flow is somewhat of an allusion to desktop publishing. Daniel said that “we deliberately chose a term that isn’t a movement, a section, or a song. It could be a 2-bar ossia or a 1200-bar movement. The existing programs don’t handle one of the simple truths very well. Much music exists in multiple sections or multiple movements. Dorico handles this all in one step.”
Once a flow is defined, it can be assigned to a layout. Generally speaking, a layout will either be a full score or a part. A layout could also be a custom score, such as a piano-vocal score or a rehearsal score, or a part with only a single movement. If a player has no music but is still assigned to a flow, it will have a tacet multirest.
Layout options can be set to have independent page, system and staff sizes, as well as margins, player order, and transposition.
Notation options are set on a per-flow basis. These include rules of meter, rest splitting, and beaming.
Engraving options, such as the visual appearance of all notations, will be project-wide.
There are no plans to be able to extract parts in Dorico. Daniel alluded to Steve Jobs when talking about a stylus: “If we make Dorico so that you have to extract parts, we messed up.”
Write mode
Inputting music in Dorico is done via the mouse, computer keyboard, or MIDI input. It relies only on keys found on laptop keyboards, without a need for a numeric keypad.
Shortcuts are a mix of ergonomic and mnemonic shortcuts. These elements are also contained in the Write mode on the left side of the window:
- The letters A through G input notes
- The numbers 1 through 9 specify note duration (e.g., 5 is an eighth note, 6 is a quarter note, 7 is a half note)
- 0 represents a natural; – is a flat; = is a sharp
- The most common articulations are placed using the keys [ ] \ ‘
- Tuplets are placed using the semi-colon
- Grace notes use the slash key
- Augmentation dots use the period
- Rests use the comma
- Q is for chords
- I is for insert
- etc.
In Write mode, it’s not possible to select the accidental independently of the notehead; this type of tweaking is done in Engrave mode.
When inserting notes, Dorico “grammar-checks” the music on an algorithmic basis, so that the display is different depending upon the time signature and engraving options, although the underlying note value is always retained. For instance, if you input a quarter note on the second half of the beat in 4/4 time, Dorico will change the notation to two eighth notes tied together:
However, if you continue to input a quarter note, Dorico will recognize the pattern as a syncopated pattern and change the notes back to a single quarter note:
Of course, this can be overridden. Daniel said that “we’ve tried to make it so that the intent is communicated at the highest level so that the program can have a rich enough understanding of what the music is meant to be doing. ”
Tuplets and other note durations are easily reconstituted over the barline. Grace notes are laid out as if they were on their own miniature system. Processing is run on the grace notes, and then they are “glued” back in because of the spacing algorithm. It’s possible to place grace notes at the end of the bar.
Notably (no pun intended), Dorico is the first scoring program to truly support writing in open meter. If you don’t specify a time signature, you can write as many notes as you like, for as long as you like. You can also impose a time signature on the music at any time later. Polymeter is not yet supported in Dorico, although Daniel said it is planned.
The right hand side of the window contains items such as time signatures, key signatures, dynamics, and more. Dynamic expressions and hairpins in Dorico are part of the same structure, as opposed to dividing them between text and lines. Daniel said that “We’ve gone back to first principles and want objects to be organized semantically and musically, rather than whether or not the objects look similar.”
It is possible to create linked dynamics and slurs among multiple staves, (i.e. a group of horns) — if you change one of this items on one staff, it will change the item on all of the other staves.
There is no limit in the number of voices in Dorico.
Engrave mode
The third of Dorico’s modes, Engrave, is devoted to refining the look of your score. Nothing can be created in this mode. The idea behind separating the phases of work is that it can be too easy to make an unintended musical edit while changing the finer visual details of a score.
Every graphical detail of the score’s components can be selected independently in Engrave mode. Daniel illustrated this concept in a recent blog post:
The arrow keys move the elements at a micro level, while Alt plus the arrow keys will move by a greater (but still relatively small) amount.
Properties are an important part of this mode when making fine adjustments. A properties panel is available (one appears in Write mode as well); not unlike Sibelius’s Inspector in Sibelius 7 and later, Dorico’s properties panel is contextual, displaying only the elements common to the selected element(s) at the time.
The properties panel fits neatly into a single-display setup.
Play mode
Due to the music librarians’ primary interest of music notation, Daniel did not demonstrate playback in the May 15 presentation. He said that Dorico will have a piano roll and it will be possible to adjust the played duration of the notes independently of their notated appearance.
Dorico will use the same audio engine as Cubase and Nuendo, with 192kHZ, 32-bit floating point clarity and quality. There will be a full audio mixer, including a channel strip with EQ, a compressor and a limiter, and convolution reverb.
Most interestingly, independent tracks will exist for each playing technique played by each instrument held by each player, in much the same way composers score using modern sequencers and sample libraries. Presumably this will make it easier for future interoperability among Dorico and Steinberg’s sequencer and audio products.
Dorico will be fully compatible with VST 3 virtual instruments and effect processors, but it will not support AU (Mac Audio Unit) plug-ins. According to today’s press release, it will come with virtual instruments with more than 1,500 sounds, including the HALion Sonic Workstation and the complete HALion Symphonic Orchestra library. It was unclear at the time of this writing whether the user will be allowed to use those instruments outside of the Dorico environment.
Print mode
Printing was of great interest to the MOLA audience, but owing to practicalities it was not demonstrated. Daniel said that there will be complete support for duplexing and bookleting — even to the point of printing parts with an odd number of pages on a combination of imposed landscape and single portrait pages, as he described here:
One neat addition that I don’t believe is supported by any other application, courtesy of an idea shared with me by a certain music notation enthusiast friend of mine, is that when printing 2-up or spreads, i.e. printing two portrait pages side by side on sheets of paper in landscape orientation, if the layout in question has an odd number of pages, you can choose to print the odd final page on a different paper size, in portrait orientation. This means you have fewer sheets of paper to tape when you’re putting the parts together.
Perhaps of interest to those in high-end printing environments was the tidbit that the Dorico developers tweaked its PDF output to be completely monochrome, instead of CMYK.
Other items
One striking element of Dorico’s interface is its generously spaced and plentifully illustrated dialog windows.
Daniel said that he got the idea from Elaine Gould’s music engraving reference Behind Bars. In Gould’s book, Daniel told me, “you almost don’t need to look in the index to find what you’re looking for. You just flip through until you find an illustration that suits your query, and then you read the surrounding text.” Dorico’s dialogs have a similar look; as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Indeed, the interface’s visual appeal is very clean, not using stock fonts from either Mac or Windows, but rather a user-interface font from Adobe, for a consistent look on both platforms.
As far as speed is concerned, Daniel said that Dorico runs more than 70 processes independently that perform defined and discrete tasks. He said that this will prevent Dorico from slowing down even on scores with large numbers of staves or bars, in contrast to the older notation programs which rely on less efficient ways of calculating how to redraw the score.
When saving a project, all the views including the score position and window position are saved with the score, allowing you to pick up from where you last left the project. There are three view types: galley view (otherwise known as Scroll View or Panorama), page view, and system view. The last of these, system view, is a page view of variable height. Daniel explains details of these in a post on his blog.
Unlike Sibelius’s Magnetic Layout feature, there will be no “off-switch” for collision avoidance in Dorico. An item’s default position is just where it is at the time, based in the program’s calculation of all the items in the music. Daniel said that “the program knows what you mean, it’s very stable, and you shouldn’t worry about things wandering out of place by accident.”
Dorico uses a system of “popovers,” little text fields where you might enter something like “4s” for a key signature of four sharps when placing a key signature, or “ppp” when entering dynamics. This appeared to make entry quite fast using the computer keyboard, once the shortcuts become familiar to the user.
Cue notes in Dorico are linked to the source material and automatically update, although we did not see a demonstration of this owing to time constraints.
There will not be an official printed manual. The Dorico reference will be standardized along with the other Steinberg help documents, as online searchable material.
Impressions
As Daniel told the attendees at Sunday’s presentation, every line of Dorico’s code originated from the brains of its developers. Making professional-level music notation software is unquestionably a difficult task, and for all of Dorico’s appeal, it can’t possibly have every feature that its chief competitors have with their decades-long head start. Notable omissions from Dorico’s initial release are chord symbols and guitar tablature, which will surely be deal-breakers for a number of potential users at the outset.
The upside, of course, is a complete lack of the burden of technical debt and thus, the opportunity for a fresh approach. Marry that with the tremendous skill and experience that is the brains behind Dorico, along with the deep pockets and long-term vision of Steinberg, and the potential is indeed great for the software to become significant, if not pre-eminent in its space, in time.
Still, even Daniel seemed a bit befuddled by all the anticipation and chatter about the work of his team. “It’s just a scoring program, mind you,” he told me this weekend. “We’re not curing cancer or anything like that!” And the distinct possibility exists that most people will be just fine with their existing tools, thank you very much, and Dorico will become yet another music program that may well be superior to its peers but remains relegated to the pile of many other music notation programs that have come and gone over the past several decades.
I was reminded of this possibility yesterday, as Daniel and I gave the closing presentation at MOLA entitled “A Brief History of Music Notation Technology and Their Impact on Musicians.” It continues to amaze and perplex me to behold the dozens of technologies, computerized or otherwise, that people have created in an attempt to notate music using a machine, and persist in doing so.
Daniel Spreadbury and @nycmusicservice present on the history of notation. We’ve come quite far… #MOLAHelsinki pic.twitter.com/mqdH5ueEKb
— elaine (@eliviolin) May 16, 2016
Music is not just a passion, though — it’s a way of life, and a living, for a good many folks. Many of us spend more time with our notation software than we do with our loved ones. Because of that and other reasons, not the least of which is the journey that the Dorico team took to get to this point, anticipation for this release is as high as anything our slice of the field has seen in quite a while.
From the bits we’ve seen so far, Dorico looks to be sleek, powerful, and intuitive. A first release is still several months away, and as none other than Bob Zawalich recently said, “I once spent three years working on a project that was three months from shipping for the entire period.” We certainly have no reason to believe the release date isn’t realistic. But there’s a lot still to be done. Not only does the software have yet to be completed to a usable point, it then needs to be thoroughly tested in both controlled and real-world situations before the community can truly evaluate its merits and decide if it’s worth adopting it for regular use.
The Dorico team clearly have a busy spring and summer ahead of them in order to meet both their goals and the expectations of the community, which have only increased in the last couple of years. From what we’ve seen so far, count me among those with high hopes.
Don Hicks
Hello,
As a long time Sibelius (up to 7.5) user, I’m wondering if Dorico will open my hundreds of Sib files? Or, will I have to export all of them as XML to switch over.
Thanks!
Bill
You’ll have to export them as XML
Jim Druckenmiller
Daniel has already addressed this in the FAQ section of his blog…
No. Sibelius and Finale use proprietary file formats and reverse-engineering of proprietary file formats is illegal in some countries. In any case, simply being able to read the contents of a Sibelius or Finale file would not be sufficient to be able to import the music contained within, because both applications rely on algorithms and rules contained in the software itself rather than the files saved on disk to work out how to display and format the music in the files. So in order to import music from Sibelius or Finale files, we would have to additionally reverse-engineer many of those algorithms and rules, which is impractical (as well as illegal in some countries). However, our new application will support MusicXML for both import and export, and both Sibelius and Finale have very good support for MusicXML, so that will be the recommended way to transfer data between different programs
http://blog.steinberg.net/faq/
Mark Jordan
I’m sure Daniel has said in the past that import from proprietary formats (e.g. Sibelius, Finale etc) won’t be supported but MusicXML will. I also am a long-time user of Sibelius (1.2–8.3…) but I don’t think importing native file formats is a deal-breaker, especially as XML is supported.I just want software that does a better engraving job on first pass. Fingers crossed!
Victor Pichardo
What kind of copy protection will it have? Doesn’t Steinberg use dongles?
Was there any mention about a subscription plan?
Hopefully we’ll see some sort of video demonstration soon.
Thanks for the update, Philip.
Nicholas Freestone
In an interview given with Music Teacher magazine last month, Daniel confirmed that it would be a software copy-protection system rather than a dongle.
William Kay
On the Making Notes blog, Daniel has confirmed that Steinberg’s software copy-protection will only allow the software to run on one machine. You will need to de-activate, or use a hardware dongle, to run the software on 2 machines – a “luxury” Sibelius users are used to. For myself, constantly moving between home and work machines, this is extremely disheartening.
Tiago Costa
I second that.
Emma
What do they mean that you can’t extract parts? I read that section three times and I don’t understand this – I mean, there must be a way to get parts from an ensemble score, but…
David MacDonald
Extracting here means making a separate and no-longer-related file. This is something Sibelius pioneered with Dynamic Parts many years ago. Finale calls their version Linked Parts.
Back in the bad old days, parts and scores were not part of the same file and required a lot of cumbersome re-doing of work if any edits needed to be made.
Daniel
The way I understand it, you just create a layout containing one or more flows of a specific player, while the full score is the layout with all players’ flows.
Sky
Emma, I think it means you cannot make the part into a separate file. It will only be what they call “linked parts” in Finale and Sibelius. So if you edit the part the change will also show up on the score. This concerns me because I’ve had lots of reasons to extract parts. For example, in sax and clarinet parts for atonal music I extract the parts so I can change the B#s and E#s in the part to Cs and Fs but I don’t want the spellings to change in the score (perhaps transposition purists will judge me for this). Also, I’ve made a vocal part that had an entire staff of cues, though I’m sure there would be a workaround to do something like that.
William Kay
As I understand it, you could now do this without extracting parts in Sibelius 8 (different spelling of accidentals in parts vs the score); so I guess the Steinberg team will likely implement something similar.
Gregory Winters
I will be interested to see if the product does any better with sound libraries. My experience with Sibelius 7.5 has been highly disappointing.
Ralph L. Bowers Jr.
Did not see anywhere in this whether it will be available as a 30 day demo.
Hans Nel
You can download the HALion Symphonic Orchestra library trial to evaluate it for 30 days.
https://www.steinberg.net/en/products/vst/halion_symphonic_orchestra/start.html
Bill
Independent tracks for each playing techniques seems strange, and counter the Cubase’s Expression Maps. Keyswitches have been in use for 20 years to avoid that cumbersome workflow.
Mark
Actually it is not that surprising because some libraries are starting to move away from keys witch instruments, and specifically notation programs have not done well with key switches naturally since they must be programmed manually for each instrument.
fratveno
Expression map technology will be used. As I understand it, separate tracks for each articulation will only be a (resulting) feature of the Piano Roll view. Sort of best of both worlds. Whether the notation will autogenerate expression maps remains to be seen.. :)
David MacDonald
I can’t wait to try Engrave mode with Astropad on my iPad!
Tiago Costa
My first impressions:
1) I like the name but don’t like that brown box logo.
2) UI and music font looking great.
3) Us$ 199,00 for a crossgrade would be more appealing for a brand new scoring app.
4) Avid made a bad move letting Mr. Spreadbury go.
William Kay
Exciting as this is, I can see an immediate hurdle with the keyboard shortcuts used for basic input. Obviously this is eminently sensible on a US/UK English keyboard; but on my Norwegian keyboard there are shortcuts which are not immediately available (eg the square bracks are SHIFT-ALT-brackets).
The logic of the last three keys on the top row affecting accidentals is also lost: the + key comes after 0, but after that there is a special regional accents key. Minus “-” is next to bottom shift, and is again a SHIFT option.
The nice thing about the Sibelius numeric keypad is that it is region independent. I have a feeling that the Dorico shortcuts, at least to start with, may prove quite illogical on a non-English keyboard.
a Jarrett
Me too (japanese-region keyboard).
Tom
$580/$300 is clearly aimed at professional users (as Daniel has stated previously). That leaves a fairly large price umbrella for more mainstream desktop apps or web apps, iPad notation software, etc. MuseScore has a lot of room to grow.
Curious also about Dorico not supporting AU.
StaffPad for iOS could still grab a chunk of market if they choose to go after it. If not, I suspect Notion will iterate as fast as possible to grab the tablet-based notation market.
David MacDonald
I’ve read lots of interviews with the StaffPad team. They seem pretty devoted to Windows. Don’t hold your breath for an iOS version. I’m planning to do some Dorico Engraving-mode work with my iPad Pro and Astropad.
Peter Roos
Awesome —- only thing I would wish (going forward) is the ability to enter notes using a pen similar to e.g. Staffpad. Congratulation Daniel and team!!
Jesper Elén
As far as I know the idea of players was first introduced in Igor some 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Engraver
Jesper
Derek Williams
Warmest congratulations to Daniel Spreadbury and his development team, and props to Steinberg for supporting this ambitious idea.
I wish you every success with the launch and look forward to its forthcoming release immensely.
David MacDonald
Just read on Daniel’s Making Notes blog comments that Dorico will use Steinberg’s software license lock, which ties the application to a single computer. I really hope that’s not the case. That’s a very antiquated way of thinking about computer use.
William Kay
I agree wholeheartedly, and would not buy the software for that reason alone. Having to deactivate my software when leaving work every day, in case I need to score at home in the evening, is prehistoric – as is the alternative of carrying a USB dongle with me!
Steinberg need to consider how people work with a scoring application, as opposed to their other software. Moving between two machines for most of the composers and scorers I know is commonplace.
Bill
If you use a physical USB dongle, then you can use the application on what ever computer you plug it into.
William Kay
Yep, I get that… But why on earth should I have to remember to take a piece of kit with me everywhere, just in case I need my scoring app! I can’t just drive home in the middle of the working day if I forget it in the morning rush….that’s an hour’s work lost! Adobe gives me the full CC Suite on 2 machines, and I can remotely deauthorize and authorise a new one if needs be. That’s flexibility enough for me, and a pretty elegant solution I’d be happy to accept from Steinberg. I threw away my last dongle in the early 1990s – and Sibelius hasn’t required a “key disk” to start up since the Acorn days (yes, I’ve been with it that long!).
Peer
I don’t care if I can open my old Sibelius files or not. I will be SOOOO happy to get rid of Sibelius with it’s 1.000.000 bugs, bad support and user un-friendliness.
I’m looking forward so much to you guys.May the good times of Sibelius come back with guys who give their heart in programming and don’t see only the $-signs in their eyes.
Quewep
No Chord Symbols in this release? No thanks.
CA
Is there a microtone and multiphonics library?
Paul
Strange that they would leave Chord Notation out of the initial release. I can understand no guitar tab but Chords are standard for the most part on anything that’s not classical.
Also – I hope Daniel overhauls the look of the engraving when doing certain things. For example, Slash notation was dreadful in Sib and a good part of the reason I ended up in Finale. I could never get the output of Sib to look as good as I could in Finale. And the Slash / rhythm notation looked particularly amateurish.
Then again ,since there’s no chords, maybe this isn’t intended for use beyond classical so maybe no slash notation?
Tiago Costa
I agree with you that Sibelius’s default slash aren’t that nice. Fortunately there’s a fix:
http://www.rpmseattle.com/of_note/sibelius-rhythmic-slash-notation-tweaks/
Jarrell
I understand chord symbols will not be in the first version, but added later. I hope when slash chords are added, they are done correctly (unlike in Sibelius, sorry :-). In other words, the root is not just to the right, but also lower than the chord (but not directly below the chord, that would be a polychord). Otherwise, reading several slash chords in a measure, when both components are positioned the same horizontally, is a total pain, and no copyist would ever write that (see, for example, the various Chuck Sher books).
Rex Thomas
I have to agree with Jarrell that x/y chords should be slightly smaller & horizontal, & Dorico should move ahead & have Nashville #’s ready to go.
All that snazz & not at least offer up some ketchup? Really?
Mike Philcox
Philip, thanks for yet another thorough and informative update relating to music notation! I look forward to having a look at Dorico once released and will almost certainly purchase a copy.
I want to comment on the suggestion that Dorico might “become yet another music program that (is) relegated to the pile of many other music notation programs that have come and gone over the past several decades.” Virtually nothing is for certain but I think several factors speak against the likelihood of such a fate for Dorico:
-the immense respect that many users, including myself, hold for Daniel Spreadbury;
-Dorico’s unique status as the product of a dedicated long-term effort by some of the most experienced music notation programmers in the world; and
-Steinberg’s strong commitment and financial backing.
Thanks again, Philip, for your wonderful work on the Sibelius blog, a huge personal favourite.
Thien Bich Hoang
That’s a really good new for all of us. I absolutely agree with Peer, and I hope that Steinberg going to treat us far more better than Avid did for us.
Philip Rothman
Hi everyone, I was traveling home during all the news so am now just catching up on comments. I just wanted to thank everyone for reading the blog during this exciting trip to the MOLA conference, and to thank you for all your excellent comments!
michael gibbs
At Last !
Deborah
I desperately need to be able to use a touchscreen to move objects around for preschool material (old arthritic hands even with special mouse).
Also, I need chord symbols, figured bass, Roman Numeral symbols for harmony students.
Also, can I edit text right on the screen if I find I’ve made a typo?
Thanks
Philip Benjamin
Hopefully Philip or Daniel will help us to get a grasp soon of what this thing called a flow is.
I understand that a flow could be some music of very short or very long length and I understand that a flow is a bit like a word processing “section” – by breaking a word processing document into sections you are able to apply separate formatting to each section.
But here is what I am confused about. Imagine the saxophone part for Act I of a musical. It would traditionally have a series of numbers which would each have their own titles at the top of the number’s first page. So how would a flow that included several numbers show in galley view (or whatever they call it – where bars go endlessly from left to right)?
Hope we won’t have to wait long before Daniel and Philip give us more of the nitty gritty about this app.
Lee McNamara
I once used notation software exclusively (from the age of 10, in fact) to compose music, but shifted towards DAWs some time ago, not just to escape the “mechanical” playback typical of notation software, but because my process involved using a range of advanced virtual instruments which Sibelius made a true nightmare to load, access and use in any meaningfully quick and easy way…
The idea of Dorico certainly appeals to me, as I’d like to have a new notation program that is more user-friendly and intuitive than Sibelius has become (Overture was always good, especially for ease of use and VST support, though was sadly discontinued)… but as a Mac user these days, 90% of my virtual instruments are in AU format – not all of them having a VST3 equivalent plugin or not having installed the VST3 because of simply not needing it for any other program.
So if Dorico was released with a super-easy and intuitive support for most/all virtual instruments, I would certainly be very interested. But unless they choose to fully implement and support the use of AU plugins (unlikely as the rival VST3 plugin is Steinberg’s own creation…) Dorico will unfortunately fail to fit into my workflow and, I suspect, many Mac musicians workflows as well.
Tom Kecskemeti
Hello Lee……FYI Overture has not been discontinued, the company which was Geniesoft is now called Sonic Scores, and now has Overture v5 out – it’s still in public Beta, but is quickly getting all it’s bugs resolved. It has many DAW like features. You can download a 30 day trial version: https://sonicscores.com/
Samphony
You can easily get VSL Vienna Ensemble Pro. You would load the VEPRO server plugin in Dorico and in an instance of VEPRO you can host all your AU instruments. Another benefit are
– fast loading times of Dorico projects
– if a project crashes you don’t need to reload all samples and instruments
– unify workflows when switching between Dorico and DAW
Martin Devek
When I crossgrade from finale to Sibelius I paid $169.
Now Sibelius to Dorico 299!?
I would happily pay up to 199 + if they offer an iPad Pro version as well as the desktop.
Horst Boesing
I hope there will be an iOS Version too (only for free for people who bought Dorico). This should make you able to write with an Apple pencil. Something like this exists for Microsoft Surface pro! It converts hand written Score directly into the print version.
Spencer Doidge
I use Sibelius. I used to use Finale in the 90s.
I am also a Logic Pro user. My chosen media are guitar, sampler, and synth.
I would use Dorico if I could play any and all AU and VST3 sounds directly from line(s) of my Dorico score.
I have heard of no DAW users writing notation to drive digital audio. It can be done with Sibelius only by a convoluted and impractical process.
Is it Dorico to the rescue for me? How? Is the solution clean or a kludge?
Andy J Patterson
Without scrolling through all this,….will there be an educational discount like some others offer?
Philip Rothman
Andy, read the first paragraph of the article :-)
Simon Jutras
Will there be any discount offered to Score users?
Diego Cembrola
Dear Developers,
Your looks great at a first glance… but:
I suspect that your workflow is NOT the same that real composers use. I’ve never heard of any author starting by asking theirself how many players there should be in the music they have in mind: that MAY happen of course, specially writing on demand (and in this case usually the composers adapt a previously composed work), but is not the normal way of proceeding. A software that aims to emulate the real composer’s work should have a workflow like this: Composition – Instrumentation – Engraving – Proofreading – Publication.
For the rest, for me Lilypond is the best engraving software even written. Waiting for the equivalent ones for the other working steps.
Diego
Diego Cembrola
*your software