Since its initial release in October 2016, Dorico has been updated three times. Each update brought many fixes and significant improvements, but it’s fair to say that the next update will be more comprehensive than the previous ones.
Although an exact released date has not been announced, the update has been promised to come before the end of June, when the crossgrade deal from competing products expires.
The most noteworthy new feature in the next Dorico update will be support for chord symbols. Repeat endings are also in the works, and it’s those two areas which appear to be the key factors in the development and release schedule, according to a reply on Dorico’s forum written yesterday by Steinberg product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury.
Daniel said that “It’s safe to say that this will be the largest Dorico update yet, by some distance … hopefully it will make a lot of you reasonably happy.”
The promised improvements include:
- Chord symbols
- Repeat endings
- Editable note spacing
- Piano pedaling
- Improvements to enharmonic spelling during input
- Filters
- Voice editing operations
- Editing in Write mode
- Flow management features (duplicate flow, import/export flows, etc.)
- Score following in Write mode during playback
- Support for MIDI devices for playback
- Basic navigation features (go to bar, previous/next flow)
- Dynamic grouping/ungrouping
- Trigger commands from your MIDI keyboard
- MusicXML import options
- Easier handling of the VST2 whitelist
- Slur improvements
- Dozens of bug fixes
It wasn’t too long ago that software developers were notoriously tight-lipped about future plans, so this thorough list is all the more of an interesting read in addition to what Daniel has already mentioned on his blog.
Waldbaer
This update will finally make me give Dorico a real try and reading this blog makes me feel good that it could become my new standard. Repeat endings for me is such a basic thing that Dorico was out before I really got used to it, even if most of my projects are really simple (songs and arrangements for my students). Chord symbols are important, too, of course, but I don’t need them that often.
I really hope that they’ll finally make the crossgrade-option unlimited; I think it’s ridiculous to limit it to a specific date (and even more to expand that to another one) and it’s much more expensive than the competitors’ competitive offers anyway.