I gave Dorico a preliminary spin the other day. I don’t know enough about it yet to assess how difficult it will be to move from Finale to Dorico for long-time users, but this is what I’ve learned so far:
Needs at least as much resources as Finale. It looks like a full installation would require 16gb of storage space, mostly for sound libraries. Even the free SE version I’m using needs about 5gb.
The interface looks like a modern graphic drawing program, with no modal palettes (except optionally the audio transport panel if you use it in full featured mode). Everything else sits in left or right sidebars.
Finale’s “Speedy Entry” mode is similar to Dorico’s note entry, but not the same. In Finale, you can use a MIDI keyboard to play a note and, while holding down the note key, press a key on your computer’s numeric keypad to enter the note with a given duration. In Dorico, you tap the duration on the keypad first, then play the pitch on the MIDI keyboard. Exactly the reverse action! Let that be a challenge…
It looks like lyrics are entered in a small slider window above a stave rather than a modal lyric window or in place. Lyrics had only become stable and reliable in Finale in the past 10 years or so; I will have to explore this more.
I had no trouble getting the MIDI keyboard to be recognized by Dorico. I did not have to take a sidetrip to the system MIDI facility (come to think of it, I’m not even sure that still exists!). I also did not have to play with three different menu items to start using MIDI. Dorico just took care of it and played sound.
Layout and printing are not an afterthought in Dorico. Finale was a endless series of kludgy attempts to keep up with various printing systems over the years. In Dorico, printing is straightforward and can accommodate your desired format without popping up additional dialogs.
There is significant learning time involved here, and I’m hoping that a full version will have some customization options. Finale users are peppering Steinberg (the publisher) with agonized cries to “fix this” and “make that easier,” but I don’t believe they are yet actually using the software beyond looking at the tutorials.
I found Finale very workable, and was able to turn out large, complicated scores, but it took lots of practice and attention to detail. I don’t think Dorico is insurmountable, and it looks like it will reward energy put into learning it.
[Somehow “Orico” crept into an earlier edit of this post in place of “Dorico”…ick.]
Until last year, I hadn’t scored anything since the early 1980’s using a 3-point pen and an ink pot. I am definitely not qualified to rate or review music software, but I am curious about what people think of MuseScore relative to the commercial offerings. I needed to produce some scores for a choral music course I was taking, and while it was frustrating at first, within a day I felt fairly facile with MuseScore and (at least compared to my pen) found it amazing.
Free is good, of course, but I’ve become a FOSS adherent not to save a few dollars on license fees, but because all too often proprietary products are discontinued or grow odious licensing terms or lose critical features. Just today, I was asked to add some photos to a web site I had developed years ago… using iWeb. Ugh.
If I’m going to invest the time, money, and effort needed to make use of a software suite, and more specifically if I’m going to rely on it for my business, I want some sort of assurance that the software is not going to disappear or grow distasteful licensing terms after I become reliant on it. FOSS offers some of that assurance.
I’ve tried to make Musescore work because they do have the minimum of early music features. But in practice those are still fairly buggy and I gave up.
Horses for courses. If the kind of music you work with fits the feature set of Musescore, that’s great. The people who pay $ or $$$ for notation software include those who either need or want professional output, need to meet specific publisher style guides, need tools e.g. to help with collapsing an orchestral score into a piano version, and/or are doing something other than mainstream music.
Music notation is an ocean of complexities. Different instruments, places, eras, genres, can need different notations. I don’t know of any notation software that can straightforwardly set full mensural notation, let alone play it. It could be done, but there aren’t enough of us who want it for that feature to get further than a to do list. But the more professional software has enough engraving flexibility to fake much of the appearance so that humans, especially students and amateurs, can play it more easily than from either a facsimile or a translation into modern notation. Which brings up a second can of ragworms–playing what’s entered. Human players of many genres don’t play what’s written as written, so each supported style has to be included into the playback software, else it all sounds somewhere from mechanical to wrong even you’re using the sound more for error finding than for production. So many features can start trying to conflict with each other, so it takes lots of debugging. Then it all has to be documented. Unsurprisingly, a lot of that is boring, and above some level of complexity it only gets done well enough if you pay the people who do it.
Between this and what looks like exhaustive key customization under “Key Commands,” a user could set up their system so that note entry acts exactly like Finale’s “Speedy Entry.” That would extend to the definition for each number pad duration definition.
This would be a game-changer for all the Finale users concerned about learning an entirely new work flow. In my estimation, at least 30 percent of the work involved in engraving a score is getting the right notation in the right spots. I have 30 years of muscle memory embedded in my body, where right hand hovers over the number keypad and left hand plays pitches on a MIDI keyboard. (I even purchased an auxiliary number keypad for a PowerBook 165 back in the day to help with this.)
It might be fairly easy for Steinberg to add a “Finale Speedy Entry” option for all of the tiers in the next update, since the actual app is the same for all tiers. (The license manager seems to control which features are available at launch.) Whether they would add it might depend on people who want it asking for it. It would certainly save a lot of people-hours of tedious key mapping.
I’ve been out of music software long enough to have lost most or all habits, good and bad, so I have learn almost everything from scratch regardless.
That’s an adoption path I think we’re going to encounter a lot. As I observed upthread a number of my friends learned digital engraving using Sibelius because that’s what their school or conservatory had adopted.
But I’m also aware of others who heard that “Sibelius is easier/faster/more satisfying to use than Finale” and jumped to it. My opera-writing friend would get stuck at times trying to make something work in Sibelius that I knew would be accomplished easily in Finale—and would also produce scores that would choke Finale’s antiquated page cast-off model.
I agree it would be a nice option that might convince some potential users to do the crossgrade. I don’t know why else they would have made a complete key-mapping prefs utility and included an option to flip note pitch entry from after to before.
As I dig into it more and more it really does look like some of the graphics applications that had an option to “use Photoshop key mappings” or mimic PageMaker’s defaults. (Yeah, I’m still talking about PageMaker 25 years after the last time I used it! Some things just aren’t soothed by the passage of time…)
Similar to others here, I saw a decline in the app and an increase in clutter and vague icons once Avid bought out Sibelius. When I read that the entire Sibelius creation team had been fired and was working on a new paradigm for music notation software, I signed on with v. 1. But it wasn’t till the pandemic that I had the time to really start using it.
They’ve done a tremendous amount of research about engraving that is fascinating and applied over time to the app. Comparing output, it just looks better, with their only real competitor in that arena being Lilypond (and that’s a paradigm that I tried once and realized was not the way I worked with music and notation).
Because I work with Balkan and Turkish music, having the ability to easily (by comparison with F & S) set up, e.g., 57 EDOs for Turkish classical music and have pieces play back accurately is amazing. Odd rhythms are a cinch to setup, and I especially like having the ability to notate long improvisatory passages without having to worry about barlines and meter.
I’ve been impressed with the level of support the Dorico team provides, both in their 1500p manual and their forums. The lead developer (Daniel Spreadbury) has personally replied not just to me but to many others. I don’t know what else he does in his life, but it was great he had the time to do that.
Finally, the videos available on the Dorico YouTube channel are professionally done, and there are long ones that go into great detail with many examples, and these have helped me a lot also. This level of support, backed by a major company, and consistent and clear upgrades and improvements are why I want to support this software by paying for it. This software will likely outlast me, and that’s fine, I no longer have to search for something better.
Probably more info than you wanted, but I’m enthusiastic about this software and the team developing it.
I’m thinking just the opposite [Edit: about whether this is more info than I wanted!] in terms of how your experience with Dorico has been. Looking at the YouTube “welcome to Finale users” videos that Steinberg has posted since the announcement, most of the comments are of the fear and loathing variety.
People hate change, and in my professional experience I’ve found that it takes informative testimonials like yours to help them overcome it.
An application I use very much is RStudio, and this is written using the Electron framework which makes it cross-platform across Windows, MacOS and Linux. It was originally written using QI, which is free for non commercial software, and I think that Electron does a better job. It is a strange mix of C++ or Objective-C API, JavaScript and the Chromium browser engine. It results in very large applications but it works well. It benefits from the work that Google has done to make Chrome cross-platform.
That makes sense for certain applications. Finale goes back so deep into the original Macintosh code, and I suspect has so many workarounds in its code base to adapt to the various microprocessor and OS shifts over the years that those “millions of lines of code” cited in the EOL announcement include several million devoted to the workarounds.
One example: Finale uses two measurements for spacing. One is an EVPU, or “Enigma Virtual Page Unit” (anyone remember Enigma?). 1 EVPU is equivalent to .25 Points (an Adobe “point,” not a printer’s point which is slightly different), .08819 mm, .04167 [music engraver’s] Space, .02083 Pica (again, an Adobe “pica” which normalizes points and picas in relation to the inch), .00882 cm, or .000347 inches.
Spacing on the page is expressed in EVPUs.
It uses EDUs, or “Enigma Duration Units,” to represent the duration of rhythmic values. This is a relative expression, with the smallest unit they define as a 128th note (equal to 32 EDUs).
A programmer could certainly work with these values, but having to pay attention to different platforms, processors, and timing differences, not to mention debugging rendered music that adheres to a time specification on one user’s installation but not another, and installing yet another patch to make it work, would be tough enough as is. To get it to work cross-platform using a translation framework such as Electron makes my non-programmer’s head hurt, a lot.
I think, reluctantly, that MakeMusic was not wrong in saying they had climbed that mountain just enough times; I wonder if they have been deliberating this since WWDC in June and decided to cut their losses before a MacOS release they knew would break features in their application.
