I bought Dorico when it first came out and have installed every upgrade as it was announced, and I think it's a great piece of software but for my uses it has some severe limitations, many of which are my own and not the program's.
I'm not sure what you mean by "20th/21st century notation" since in my experience there is such a wide array of notational devices, many invented by a single composer and never moving beyond that, some of them graphical, some of them in my experience incomprehensible, with others more expansions of traditional notation, and a huge amount of it simply the same traditional notation from the 18th and 19th century. Since my notational needs are pretty much 100% traditional notation I can't speak to the ability to use more experimental notation. But there is a great forum at Steinberg.net which is free to join and that would be the best place to ask since there are people who are making great use of Dorico for completing new projects and publishing their works. My background: I started out doing computer music notation with MusicPrinterPlus version 3 for DOS and when that program no longer would work, I made the jump to Finale version 3.25, and have bought practically every annual upgrade along the way. I bought the crossgrade to Sibelius for Windows version 2.11 and bought the upgrades as they came out but didn't really start using it for projects until version 5, when I finally sat down and learned Sibelius from scratch instead of trying to adapt my Finale work-flow to Sibelius. Ever since then I have been using Sibelius as my primary notation software but have stopped buying upgrades since verson 7.1.3. That is still the app I use for most of my notational needs. I find there is much to like about Dorico and much which is overly fussy in my opinion. I will admit that I have yet to sit down and really learn Dorico as I should, which is something I intend to do this fall. I find their use of "flows" confusing but I find their separation of the whole computer notation process into different "modes" to be helpful. They have Setup (similar to but not the same as the new score wizards in either Finale, Sibelius or MuseScore), Write (where the music itself is entered), Engrave (where how the music actually will look on the page is finalized), Play (self-explanatory), and Print (also self-explanatory). Their music entry in the Write mode is very refreshing -- a person can simply start entering the music (pitch and rhythm) without regard for meter, measures, etc. That way a person can be inspired to create a melodic line if so desired before worrying about meter, key, placement of barlines, etc. And then a person can play around with different meters and the program will re-notate what has been entered. I believe they call that "modeless entry." It's what happens after that that is where I get bogged down. At the bottom of the screen is a narrow bar with an up-pointing arrowhead, and what is displayed when that is clicked differs depending on what has been clicked on in the music. It's sort of like the "Inspector" in Sibelius. The confusing thing to me so far about this is that I can't remember what information will be shown, or what I can do with it all. Dorico has much which can be adjusted (like Finale) and that freedom can bring confusion with it until a person has learned the program through intense usage. And so far there isn't a very complete user manual. The user can keep that panel open but then it eats up screen real-estate so less of the score is shown. Dorico can't do polymetric music where the length of the beat varies from staff to staff -- independent meters where the barlines don't line up from staff to staff is the norm. That means that a quarter-note in one staff equals a quarter note in another staff regardless of the two time signatures. Thus a section with 2/4 in some staves against 6/8 in other staves has all the 8ths moving at the same speed rather than different speeds, keeping the 2 beats in each of the different meters constant. They will supposedly add that capability "in an upcoming upgrade" but the precise version number or date hasn't been indicated yet. There's a lot Dorico does very nicely and a lot which I find to be very unintuitive (which I realize simply means that I haven't wrapped my head around their processes yet). Anybody who wants to learn more about what Dorico can and can't do should join the Steinberg.net Dorico forum and ask specific questions about your notational desires/needs. At this point someone on that forum, whether any of several Steinberg employees (including Daniel Spreadbury, the brains behind Dorico) or any of the many current Dorico users, will most likely have an answer. There is also an online manual which can also be downloaded in PDF format for offline reading, at: <https://steinberg.help/dorico/dorico/> One final point which many people have found to be very off-putting: Dorico uses the very intrusive Steinberg licensing and activation process whereby you can only use the software on a single machine at a time because of either their e-licenser dongle (small and easily lost if you move around a lot) or through the use of their e-licenser software. You can have Dorico installed on any number of machines and you either plug in the USB dongle to be able to use Dorico on a specific machine or you de-activate it in the e-licenser software on one machine and then re-activate it on the other machine (you need to have the computers hooked up to the internet to use that process). Personally I don't move between computers all that much and since I've yet to really get into using Dorico it isn't an issue -- I did purchase the USB dongle since I have more faith in hardware than in software. I did have a motherboard failure shortly after installing Dorico and it was easy to get the program up and running on the new motherboard -- Steinberg does all it can within its "you can't use this on more than one machine at a time, dammit!" philosophy to make moving between machines easy. If you have specific questions about specific notational wants/needs I'll be happy to try to answer them if I can. David H. Bailey On 9/1/2017 6:45 PM, James Gardner wrote: > Hello Finale list > > Has anyone here been checking out/using Dorico? > > Interested to hear your thoughts on its engraving fine-tuning, horizontal > spacing, handling of 20th/21st century notation etc. > > Playback aspects are of little interest to me. > > Cheers > > Jim > -- ***** David H. Bailey [email protected] http://www.davidbaileymusicstudio.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: [email protected]
