Dorico…to be or not.

[OCTO]

Today I had a chance to work with one of my students, looking at his orchestral score in Dorico.  From my point of view, I haven’t seen so many clicks and pop-ups since the "Finale days."  The output was generally "ok", but I wasn't particularly impressed by the default result.  He had to go through quite a few extra steps to tweak and adjust things, constantly.

I still regard Finale as a superior tool in the sense that you can do almost impossible things with it, and quite efficiently, and of course, if you have unlimited time.  But the way Dorico works is not what I expected.  Apart from some older scores in Finale, I now work in Sibelius, not by wish, but by destiny.  Still, I don’t see a compelling reason to move to Dorico.

Tell me I'm wrong.  Even using MuseScore makes me feel liberated.

[dspreadbury]

Dorico is designed specifically to reduce the amount of manual adjustment required to produce a good-looking score and parts. In many respects that is the fundamental difference between Dorico and Finale: Finale gives you extraordinary freedom to manipulate almost anything, but it also expects you to take responsibility for a great deal yourself. Dorico tries to understand the musical and notational intent and do much more of that work automatically.

That doesn’t mean its defaults will suit every score or every engraver, of course. But if your student was constantly tweaking and adjusting individual objects, I’d be interested to know what kinds of changes he or she was making. Often there is a higher-level setting in Engraving Options, Layout Options or Notation Options that can make the desired change systematically, rather than requiring repeated local adjustments. One of the bigger adjustments in coming from Finale or Sibelius is learning when not to intervene locally.

I certainly wouldn’t claim that everybody should prefer Dorico, and if Sibelius or MuseScore fits the way you like to work, there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’d be reluctant to judge Dorico principally by watching someone else operate it, particularly if they themselves may not yet be taking full advantage of the way it is designed to work.

So rather than simply telling you that you’re wrong, I’d be genuinely interested to see the score, or even a few examples of the things that required all those clicks and pop-ups. If Dorico really is making something unnecessarily laborious, that’s useful feedback for us. And if there’s already a quicker or more idiomatic way to achieve the same result, I’d be happy to show you.

[MichelRE]

Dorico has been a godsend to me.
Once I understood how to adjust the default settings, I spent WAY less time making annoying little changes in my scores than I did with Finale.
Sometimes I would need to spend a month or two creating parts in Finale.
Now I may spend a few days.
There are always little things you might want to tweak, but there will NEVER be as much tweaking in Dorico as there was in Finale, which could be a real nightmare.

[Mr_Incognito]

For me a clear NOT.

[jrethorst]

Digital notation began for me with Deluxe Music Construction Set, back in the 80s. I progressed through Professional Composer, survived learning Finale v. 1, upgraded to 2 and 3, couldn’t take the interface any more, switched to Overture for its very nice interface. Got v. 2, upgraded to 3, became active on its forum, was a beta-tester for v. 4, bailed because of the bugs. I was then unhappy with Sibelius for too long, thought I should investigate Musescore and Dorico. Musescore was nice but Dorico won. It’s the best program I’ve ever used.

[David Ward]

I'm still learning Dorico, having used Finale for about 26 years and manuscript since about 1950 (I'm 85: born in early 1941). Almost the first thing I learnt about using Dorico was ‘try not to interfere with the way it does things unless you really have to’. This is difficult for one of my temperament (understatement). That said, there are many general settings that can be adjusted to suit one's needs, although it takes a while to find out what these are and how to change them.

That said, I aim to persevere with Dorico and would recommend it to others.