I am a month into my serious usage of Dorico 2 and thought I'd provide
an update on my experience. Everything about Dorico is more elegant.
But that means it is radically different from the mode of operation
deeply ingrained in long-term Finale users. Many of us have learned
Finale over a span of 10 or even 20 years. There is a big learning
curve with any product of this complexity. There are many resources for
Dorico information (help pages, a comprehensive manual, YouTube videos,
monthly Facebook live sessions etc.) The product is evolving so quickly
that none of these sources is definitive and up to date. So the user is
on his or her own to assemble one's own best practices and workflow. In
my case, I started compiling a Word document of tips and techniques for
everything I do regularly. Otherwise I would not be able to remember
most of it. Over the course of the month, this document has grown to
about 30 pages and 100 procedures, but I don't have to refer to it very
often now.
The heavy Dorico user relies on PC keystrokes and shortcuts. These can
be hard to remember until you develop muscle memory. Once you have that,
I think productivity with Dorico is far greater than Finale because
Dorico takes care of so many of the tedious details automatically. For
example, there is an "Engraving" mode in Dorico where you can make your
final layout changes. With Finale, this part of the process often
represented 20% of my time. Layout decisions with Dorico are far beyond
Finale and Sibelius. I have done some projects that literally required
no layout changes whatsoever.
There has been practically no investment in Finale functions most of the
past decade, and I believe we should not expect much from the company.
People who are completely satisfied with what Finale does for them today
may have no reason to look at Dorico. People who spend many hours per
week doing composing, arranging or engraving really can increase their
productivity (and possibly income) by learning Dorico. I do think there
is a threshold of use needed to make it worthwhile to take on this new
learning curve.
The big issue is this. Almost everything Dorico does is more productive
and more elegant than the equivalent processes in Finale. While Dorico
probably does 90% of the things you can do with Finale today (and a
great many things you cannot easily do with Finale,) that last 10% can
be a real roadblock. I have not seen a comprehensive list of the things
that a Finale user would not be able to accomplish in Dorico, but here
are a few examples.
* Playback in general is not advanced. There is no support for D.S.,
D.C. and similar variations. You can engrave these with text symbols,
but playback will not recognize that.
* There is no ability to set swing in playback
* If you are heavily dependent on Staff Styles in Finale, there is no
real equivalent (other than the slash regions and bar-repeat regions,
and they don't have the flexibility associated with Finale Staff Styles)
* Chord support in Dorico is light years ahead of Finale and you can
really fly through that part of a project that requires chord symbols.
However, it is very difficult to have different chord spellings for
different instruments.
There are more issues. I'm not trying to be comprehensive. However, I
have reached the point that I am so much more productive with Dorico
that I probably will not be creating any new Finale projects.
A couple more observations to wrap up. There many bugs in Version 2.0.
The Steinberg team is large and heavily engaged in fixing these things.
There should be a patch release out in the next few weeks that will
bring the product up to a normal "stable production" level. Also, there
is a very active, and growing, user community, and that definitely helps.
On 6/2/2018 12:45 AM, Craig Parmerlee wrote:
On 5/31/2018 3:40 PM, David H. Bailey wrote:
While I'm disappointed that the major thrust of Dorico version 2
seems to be scoring to video, I realize that's a very large and
growing segment of the notation/composition software market so it
should be a means to even better cementing Dorico's future.
I did the free trial of Dorico 1. I used it to do a re-transcription
of several orchestral pieces that had multiple movements ("flows" in
Dorico-speak) and some irregular meter / beat patterns. It was slow
going because of the learning curve but I was struck at how well the
music layout happened, almost completely automatically. I find myself
spending many hours fiddling with Finale parts to get them to lay out
reasonably. It is clear to me that Dorico does many things (including
layout) better and will save a lot of time.
However, for me, I must have slash notation and rhythmic notation
because mostly I do jazz band arrangements. And those things were not
there in Dorico 1. The final release of Dorico 1 included chord
symbols, and they did a fantastic job with that -- much more coherent
than Finale.
Dorico 2 adds slash and rhythmic notation, so I bought the crossgrade
and am now working on my first jazz band project. It is unfortunate
that the product does not play back DS al coda, but that is not
required in this project.
Anyway, I actually wanted to respond to your comment about video being
the focus of 2.0. Certainly that is part of it. But a big portion of
the "video support" is a better structure for varying tempos, and this
can be useful even without video. And this tempo business has been
one of the most troublesome parts of Finale playback. It seems we
have been told more than a year ago that this was a big focus of
Finale development, yet we haven't seen anything in that time.
Apart from video, I'd say there was a major effort to address
jazz/pop/commercial writers as noted above. And also there was a big
focus on playback. That is not just the Note Performer integration.
They also have added depth to the "DAW portion" of Dorico with support
for automation curves and unlimited controller functions. This adds
to the existing capabilities for MIDI editing separate from the
notation itself (e.g, if a note sounds just a little too long, you can
change the MIDI very easily without having to change the notation)
These things add up to major advancements.
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