Steinberg Dorico

[Fred G. Unn]

I only hope that I will be able to use my current fonts and settings, or there may be no switch-over.

This is a good point. A lot of publishers and engravers have invested considerable time and effort in coming up with a unique "house style" with their current programs. If Dorico turns out to not have much flexibility in this (I haven't had time to watch the video yet) then that would be disappointing.

[Knut]

I only hope that I will be able to use my current fonts and settings, or there may be no switch-over.

This is a good point. A lot of publishers and engravers have invested considerable time and effort in coming up with a unique "house style" with their current programs. If Dorico turns out to not have much flexibility in this (I haven't had time to watch the video yet) then that would be disappointing.

Indeed, this is an excellent point.

There is of course no way to know for sure until the program is released, but based on all I've read and heard, I am quite certain Dorico will be at least as flexible as Finale in this regard. In a way, Dorico seems to combine the automation of Sibelius with the flexibility of Finale. It uses lot of automation and fancy algorithms to make sure the music adheres as closely as possible to convention. Under the surface, however, there seems to be an incredible amount of options (more than 50 for ties alone!) and an extensive amount of tweakability to just about every aspect.

Music fonts seem to me to be the major culprit of customization at the moment, because Dorico requires these to be SMuFL compliant, at least to be fully functional. MakeMusic is evidently in the process of making Maestro SMuFL compliant, but until then, only the native Bravura font and November 2.0 will support Dorico.

[John Ruggero]

Knut wrote:

MakeMusic is evidently in the process of making Maestro SMuFL compliant, but until then, only the native Bravura font and November 2.0 will support Dorico

which brings up an interesting possible scenario: at the end of 2016, both Finale 2016, which includes a SMuFL version of Maestro, and Dorico appear. Engravers buy Finale to use Maestro in Dorico.

[Knut]

Knut wrote:

MakeMusic is evidently in the process of making Maestro SMuFL compliant, but until then, only the native Bravura font and November 2.0 will support Dorico

which brings up an interesting possible scenario: at the end of 2016, both Finale 2016, which includes a SMuFL version of Maestro, and Dorico appear. Engravers buy Finale to use Maestro in Dorico.

It's possible. Although, the full fonts are usually included in the demo version of Finale, so unless this changes there will be no need to upgrade just for the fonts.

I'm really curious how extensive the symbol set and OpenType functionality of a SMuFL compliant Maestro font will be, though. Not to mention what SMuFL support in Finale will actually entail.

[tisimst]

I only hope that I will be able to use my current fonts and settings, or there may be no switch-over.

If you'd like some help to make your fonts SMuFL compatible, I can certainly lend you a hand there.

[Fred G. Unn]

I finally got around to watching the video. Wow, there's a lot to digest there! I must admit, most everything looks pretty great. I like the concept of switching between modes. This is very similar to another program I use a lot, Adobe Lightroom, and I think it works well. The concept of "master pages" for layout will also be very familiar to anyone who uses Adobe InDesign for publishing. Finale's MIDI tool is pretty terrible, so being able to adjust playback in the Play mode will be quite useful when I have to quickly edit a mock-up playback to send out. All the engraving options and the visual menus seem pretty fantastic too. The fact that the music just sort of exists on its own and isn't locked into a measure or a grid is great idea, and it will be cool when they eventually support polymeter.

One small concern - around the one hour and 4 minute mark he mentioned that the music spacing is a 1.4 ratio. I am assuming this will be editable, but he didn't actually say that it would. Ever since this comparison I've been using 1.5 and would like to continue to do so.

[John Ruggero]

tisimst wrote:

If you'd like some help to make your fonts SMuFL compatible, I can certainly lend you a hand there.

That is a very generous offer. Thank you so much. Actually, I only use Maestro, Engraver, Wess's italic font, and my own G clefs, so I guess I would only need help with the latter. I have never looked in to the SMuFL business, so I don't know how involved it is to bring my clef up to standards. My fear would be that it might require a redesign. If you think that a practical mini-tutorial on the SMuFL would be helpful to me and others, that would be wonderful.

[John Ruggero]

Knut wrote:

the full fonts are usually included in the demo version of Finale

That is encouraging. I hope they continue that policy.

This is certainly an exciting time for music engraving!

On a different subject:

Daniel mentioned that MusXML transfers into Dorico would strip out manual adjustments and substitute Dorico's defaults. This does concern me, because it might force me to continue using Finale for one of my editions that is a mass of intricate hand work that I would not care to do again.

[John Ruggero]

Fred wrote:

The fact that the music just sort of exists on its own and isn't locked into a measure or a grid is great idea

I am glad that you are as impressed as I was, Fred. I do sometimes get a little over-excited. When he explained what you are describing in the the quote above, I immediately thought: Schenkerian graphs. Finally there is a GUI program that can do these without workarounds. (I'll bet LilyPond has no trouble with these as well.)

[tisimst]

tisimst wrote:

If you'd like some help to make your fonts SMuFL compatible, I can certainly lend you a hand there.

I have never looked in to the SMuFL business, so I don't know how involved it is to bring my clef up to standards. My fear would be that it might require a redesign. If you think that a practical mini-tutorial on the SMuFL would be helpful to me and others, that would be wonderful.

The SMuFL standard is more about "where should glyphs go?" versus "what should they look like?". So, there's likely no need to change your design at all. It's really a matter of re-encoding the glyphs to be in the correct code-point so the application knows where to find them.

After that, generating the other metadata is pretty painless with a good script (which I have created).