Oh dear — notation versus engraving. That’s a discussion which is pretty similar to mac versus PC, and equally pointless.
Just a few thoughts here, which repeat what I wrote before.
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There’s no war between engraving and playback, and never has been.
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When Daniel and his team were hired by Steinberg, their primary job was to develop a world class engraving program, that would be better than the existing programs out there (notably Sibelius and Finale). “Better” means more logically laid out, more intuitive, more musician / composer oriented. Better designed under the hood, meaning using 2015 ff software coding capabilities, not 1990s software conventions on which Sibelius and Finale were written. Clean start.
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While the primary goal was engraving, they have not ignored the playback, and in fact, the most recent Dorico webinar by John Barron clearly demonstrates that they have great plans for the future.
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Sadly they have only a dozen of employees, not 2,000, or it would have been implemented already.
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As to the implementation with third party libraries, the best thing really that Dorico can do - and they have that planned, from what I understand - is to give the users of Dorico the tools to create their own expression maps. And then encourage people to share them. Given the unlimited amount of VSTs out there, and everyone’s personal preference, it is impossible for the Dorico team to take primary responsibility for this.
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The whole “integration with Cubase” thing is a distraction in my opinion - if Dorico’s playback engine is good, as I’m sure it will be, there’s no need for “integration” with Cubase. The groundwork for a good mockup would be possible inside of Dorico, any finetuning could be done in any DAW program.
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On top of the expression, there is a need to tweak individual notes through midi cc lanes - that’s not there yet but in the planning also.
Just my $0.02.