Dorico Notation Software

[jzucker]

Jack, Dorico is a very very new product build from scratch by some of the original Sibelius dev team. There's tons of features missing and annoying bugs and everything you'd expect from an very early stage product. They try to be pretty clear about this and responsive, but it's just not at the stage where it will be an apples to apples comparison with Sibelius/Finale, which obviously have 20ish years of product development behind them.

so why should i invest money in them then? Why not switch to musescore which is open source?

[pcsanwald]

so why should i invest money in them then? Why not switch to musescore which is open source?

Sounds like a plan! the only reason I mentioned it is to maybe save you some frustration with Dorico; it's super early stage and thinking of it like a full fledged competitor to musescore/finale/sibelius just sounded like a recipe for frustration to me. that's why I was mentioning!

[jzucker]

no problem paul. Sometimes these companies just amaze me, like finale trying to get you to pay $150 because they upgraded to 64 bit executable and refactored their code for it to be easier to support and make upgrades. My response was:

Make some functionality improvements and prove you did what you claim and then I'll pay the upgrade fee.

[Durban]

As a composer i care only about one thing music.

sseing, some product bashing re Musecore try to remember its free if you dont like it dont use it, but dont bleat.

Dorico is a Steinberg product, so bound to be a $$$ with all the the relevant marketing BS & endless promo. and upgrades.

Dorico only getting chord symbols later is a telltale sign, not designed by musicians, as that would be
numero uno for me.

[jzucker]

i didn't see anyone bashing musescore

[PMB]

As a composer i care only about one thing music.

sseing, some product bashing re Musecore try to remember its free if you dont like it dont use it, but dont bleat.

Dorico is a Steinberg product, so bound to be a $$$ with all the the relevant marketing BS & endless promo. and upgrades.

Dorico only getting chord symbols later is a telltale sign, not designed by musicians, as that would be
numero uno for me.

It is designed by musicians but they mostly come from a classical background so guitar-related symbols aren't their first priority. I was one member of a group some 15 years ago that gave input and beta-tested for Sibelius G7. At that stage, basic options such as scale diagrams were non-existent in Sibelius and it took a bit of effort to convince the team that things like that were a publishing priority. Even now, the default guitar chord voicings in their diagrams seem to be decided by some strange algorithm that bears no relationship to the most common forms. All that said, I found Daniel Spreadbury and the London-based Sibelius crew to be extremely dedicated and I hope they have success with Dorico.

[fep]

Had a quick look at soundfonts on the Internet. Certainly not willing to criticize anything, I don't think they are at the level of those sound libraries that can be used with Sibelius or Dorico, both in variety and in terms of the amount of sampled data (some drum libs are measured in hundreds of GB, a VSL piano is 70GB). I know size doesn't imply quality and some excellent libs which are not sample based are relatively small.

Funnily available guitar sounds are not really at the quality level of other usual instruments, piano, horns, drums, bass !! That says a lot on the instrument.

You can add what ever soundfonts you want to MuseScore.

[Stevebol]

For anyone interested check out my staccato section string soundfonts. I made them from the 'VCO' samples;

Login - Dropbox

[pcsanwald]

Dorico only getting chord symbols later is a telltale sign, not designed by musicians, as that would be
numero uno for me.

I don't want to sound like an apologist for Dorico here (I'm a sibelius user), but, they have been very open about their development process and blogged about it for 4 years straight: Welcome! | MAKING NOTES

they even kept a public development diary:
Development diary, part six | MAKING NOTES

and have consistently done polls to try and prioritize features like playback. It's an extremely experienced team, they clearly care deeply about engraving software (at a point in history where very few people do), and I have a lot of respect for what they are trying to do.

I've never used Dorico and have no opinion about their current software, although I do plan to give it a try once it's further along and there are less bugs and more features. But, I've followed their development since Daniel left Sibelius and have been rooting for them the whole way.

[pcsanwald]

It is designed by musicians but they mostly come from a classical background so guitar-related symbols aren't their first priority.

I think this is pretty key. Things like chord symbols seem important for jazz musicians, but outside of jazz, it's a very niche thing. The marriage of chord symbols and notation is pretty much unique to jazz in my experience (my experience is mostly western classical chamber/orchestral stuff and jazz, everything from big band to small groups).

If I had to theorize why, I'd hypothesize their target market is not people making charts for pop/rock, because no one is going to pay their asking price to make chord charts. If I were in their shoes, I'd be prioritizing things for target market at all costs, and that's likely to be educational institutions purchasing engraving software for their students to use, and not jazz musicians making charts.

I'm not saying that we, as jazz musicians making charts, should just suck it up and buy this software anyways. What I am saying is that I can definitely see how something like chord symbols doesn't need to be on the "must be done before shipping" list.

[jzucker]

It's rare nowadays to find a classical musician who doesn't dabble in popular music in some way. It's extremely myopic to ignore those concerns and doesn't bode well for future updates. Additionally, i see ZERO point in migrating from one corporate entity (either finale or sibelius) to another one and if you are starting from scratch, why would you consider something with 75% of the functionality of the other two?!?

At least musescore is open source so I would think the continued support would grow and not be encumbered by things like having to get people to pay for useless features in order to continue to pay the salaries of marketing and support staff...

I think this is pretty key. Things like chord symbols seem important for jazz musicians, but outside of jazz, it's a very niche thing. The marriage of chord symbols and notation is pretty much unique to jazz in my experience (my experience is mostly western classical chamber/orchestral stuff and jazz, everything from big band to small groups).

If I had to theorize why, I'd hypothesize their target market is not people making charts for pop/rock, because no one is going to pay their asking price to make chord charts. If I were in their shoes, I'd be prioritizing things for target market at all costs, and that's likely to be educational institutions purchasing engraving software for their students to use, and not jazz musicians making charts.

I'm not saying that we, as jazz musicians making charts, should just suck it up and buy this software anyways. What I am saying is that I can definitely see how something like chord symbols doesn't need to be on the "must be done before shipping" list.

[pcsanwald]

It's rare nowadays to find a classical musician who doesn't dabble in popular music in some way. It's extremely myopic to ignore those concerns

eh, I think this is where we disagree. My opinion is that they didn't ignore anything, they just prioritized differently. I'm probably just way more sympathetic than most, in the two software companies I've helped start in the past 6 years, it's always a huge struggle to prioritize things and people are always going to be disappointed and wondering why you did X instead of Y. So, I think I'm sounding like an apologist here just because I've been in their shoes a lot .

My personal reason for caring about Dorico at all is because I see Steinberg investing in engraving software in a day and age when no one else is. And as a musician/composer who is profoundly dependent on notation, I really just want to support that.

Nothing against muse score and I'm sure it's awesome, a good friend of mine who's a great arranger swears by it. I just think that competition is good for this (seemingly shrinking) market and I'm happy that someone (in this case steinberg) is willing to invest in moving it forward.

[bil]

I downloaded the Dorico 30-day demo, which included a promising-looking sound library. Couldn't get the demos to play. Did some routine Mac stuff like permissions repair... no luck. Then I tried importing an xml file from Sibelius 7. Same playback issues: delayed start, stops and stutters. Music .xml export/import is usually a bit glitchy between the other notation programs, but this was drastic.
I wonder if they pushed this thing out the door before it was ready. Maybe the big shots at Steinberg (or Yamaha, parent company) got tired of waiting. Regardless, I wish them the best. Meanwhile, I'll stick with Sibelius 7.1 (which I reluctantly admit is damn good) and MuseScore which I occasionally need to use, and totally support for their open-source ethos.

[bako]

About a week into a 30 day trial on an old Mac. Running fine as far as I've tested it.
Big learning curve but there are good videos and a very out of date incomplete manual.
They just hired a manual staffer to fix that situation sometime soon.
At the same time they are very available and helpful in their forum and the Facebook group.
From what I can see, it has greater flexibility on some of the things it does but has some gaps on fundamentals.
They are wanting to get it right before releasing those features.

Various types of transposition, find and replace editing are features that I use heavily on Finale for an educational project.
Dorico has a create custom key signature function that was easy to use unlike Finale's which I could never figure out.

Will check back in further along.