A few frustrations

Dorico
1

Ok, so I’m not the first, of course. But I’m a seasoned professional who knows Gould by heart, works in experimental classical music and took the time to get into the nitty-gritty of Dorico for the last two years after having worked with Finale for most of my life.

The programme honestly feels condescending. I’m mostly trying to overrule the ‘intelligent’ notation options for basic stuff, especially the rhythmic respelling. That I can’t decide to just ‘naturally’ input a dotted half note in a compound measure without enabling ‘Force duration’ or constantly respelling the compound time signature (and then have to hide it) is a travesty, and a very normative approach to music notation.

Moreover, having been used to Finale, I know what jankiness is. But to make a simple text expression I have to create a dynamic, then hide the dynamic (although it still plays back the intensity marking) just to have text appear. And no, the text tool is of no help because then I have to tweak the font inside the library - it’s honestly frustrating stuff. I don’t have to have everything playback, I just want the text to appear. The software seems schoolmasterly in what you can’t (or shouldn’t) put into a score and what you can (or should). It takes away a lot of the fun of being expressive for expressiveness’s sake.

Then there’s the elephant in the room: Dorico is so geared towards English as a lingua franca that every single pre-programmed shortcut, every single option in properties, editing etc. is esoteric to even the proficient English L2 user. I’d never heard of a ‘voice column’ or a ‘flow’. I have to close-read the options in the notations and layout menus because they’re worded basically the same. And then they apply to the whole document! So I have to manually override almost everything - which Dorico makes very hard. Which was easy in Finale because everything was manual anyway.

Also: whereas in Finale I felt I was working in a playground, working in Dorico feels like performing open heart surgery. Things like the insert mode are a killer, changing a time signature or a tuplet moves my entire music around if not careful (and then necessitates not just removing the music but the tuplet because otherwise you’re in a very bad place). The automation feels overdone in so many ways.

Also - reading the forum, there’s a lot of condesension towards people who complain about Dorico. As if they’ve misunderstood, that they haven’t read the 1000-page manual thoroughly enough, or that the programme is just smarter than they are. The same people then suggest methods that involve 5 workarounds for the most basic stuff. That’s kind of a covert confession to the limitations of the software.

I just had to vent this. I don’t hate Dorico, and there’s a lot of neat options. I love the implementation with Steinberg (I’ve worked with Cubase for 10 years), the automatic and intuitive play-menu. The fact that you can’t mess up your music when in Engrave mode (although I would like to be able to manually make it more beautiful in Write mode so I can have peace of mind when moving on to the next measure :wink: ) and the implementation of SMUFL.

2

Can you give us an example of this? When I want to enter a dotted half, I enter a half (which appears as a tied note), and then when I press ‘dot’, I get the single dotted note.

If you really find that the Notation Options are getting in your way all the time, then you can leave Force Duration on, all the time. There’s an Application Preference for it to be “sticky” – that is, to stay in its current state as you leave and re-enter Note Input.

I have created a Paragraph Style called “Expressions”, and assigned Shift E as a shortcut to it. It’s saved as a default, so in all my documents. Perhaps such a thing should be included from the factory, but it works effortlessly. Would this be of no help?

I’m really only posting this to help you get the most from the software. Some pragmatism is inevitable, as no software is bespoke tailored to one individual.

3

Not sure if this helps much but if you have a dedicated paragraph style for your “expression text”, you can create a key command to automatically load that paragraph style in the text tool. I have one for boxed text.

(@benwiggy beat me)

4

The force duration stickiness would already be a huge windfall, to be honest. I just can’t seem to find it!

5

In the Application Preferences, under Note Input and Editing.

However, I would first ensure that you really can’t get Notation Options to work as you want. I find for most things, except some syncopation with rests or complex assortments of note values. it works well; and often saves me time.

Screenshot
Screenshot1556×738 73 KB

6

Can you give an example of this? You’re saying that for people who aren’t native English speakers, the options are difficult to understand, and this means you have to manually over-ride everything?

Dorico is certainly at its best and simplest when you understand the options that apply to everything, and then you can make only a few manual interventions as required. Making manual adjustments everywhere will be hard work (though still not as much as Finale); and can be frustrating if you’re constantly fighting the program.

I would always advise people to let Dorico work with them, rather than against them.

“Flow” is certainly a novel term in music software – though quite common in Desktop Publishing. Most other terminology does come from standard music terminology – “Casting off” is from plate Engraving, and may be unfamiliar, but .. what else would be used? I’ll give you “voice column”, though these things are explained in the Help pages (in English, though a few other languages are available).

7

As far as I know, you will have to remember to turn on Force Duration when you input the first note in every new file. The setting is not on by default. Perhaps someone will correct me. (Edit. I experimented to see if it would remain on in saved files and templates. It doesn’t seem to. So it has to be turned on each time you edit a file, I think.)

I don’t mind what had to be invented for things that didn’t have a previous terminology like “voice column”. “Flow” I’m not so keen on.

For me, there are so many brilliant things about Dorico, like the Library Manager, the cuing system, the ability to make slurs of any shape, the ease of beaming across bar lines etc.

And then there are others not so. The inflexibility of the workspace is completely at odds with the way I work and more so in dealing with orchestral scores. What I would give for floating panels.

And yes, it is galling to have an “assistant” who sometimes insists on doing things differently than you would do them. That is the price one pays for having a helper.

8

As was mentioned, a dotted half note generally shouldn’t be a problem depending on its rhythmic position, like the downbeat of 6/8 should be fine for example.

If you are not getting a dotted half note even in these simple standard situations, it might be that you configured some really weird settings under notation options / note grouping that had this effect, changing Dorico from its normal defaults. I’ve seen people change settings meant for compound time thinking they are for simple time (or vice versa) because they didn’t read the text above the option and then things can get confused.

9

Rick, I hear you. My frustration has been steady for the past few years and no matter how much I try, I just don’t like this program at all, although it does some things very efficiently.

If I could, I’d go back to using Sibelius but that is unfortunately not an option anymore. If it helps at all, you are not alone in feeling frustrated. Hang tight, I hope it gets better.

10

I made the switch to Dorico from Finale when its “retirement” was announced after using it since its early days (i think for near 40 years). It was a little frustrating until I took the time to go through the “First Steps” video and a few others. (My preferred learning style is definitely not by reading even though English is my first language – so the manual is difficult for me!)

Yes, some terms are strange – even possibly misleading at first. Engraving, Layout, and Notation options can be hard to find, then hard to parse to get what you want. (And you have to remember to “Set as Default” if you want to keep those settings for the next time!) Once you have them the way you want them, you may find you need to change them for the next piece — the software doesn’t read your mind. Then again, neither did Finale.

What Dorico has that is superior to every other application that I have used is this forum and the extraordinary people who participate in helping one another with their expertise and experience. The knowledge I gained here in my first weeks (by going back and reading many of the posts from about a year or two prior to my joining helped me tremendously. Being able to search the forum to learn how to do something (and why things work the way they do) helped me acclimate to Dorico quickly – so much so that I started to forget how to use Finale within a month or two!

I found that setting the options “properly” (that is, optimally for my preferences) and working in broad strokes first (like an artist creating a painting) allows the software to help me get what I want. Are there things I wish were included “out of the box”? Yes. Are they easy to create or add? Also, yes. Did Finale need plugins? Yes – even after 40 years!

So my advice for you – as with many other new users – is to take the time to go through the “First Steps” video, and make use of the expertise here in the forum. If possible, include a sample file showing the difficulty you are having as it will help us to help you. Also, be aware that the Dorico development team does read all the posts and will often jump in when necessary.

Good luck, have patience, and know that we’re here to help you!

— Jim

11

Welcome. Like you, I was a long-time (>30 years) Finale user and also was a beta tester for a good many years. That said, I quickly moved on to Dorico, and got up and running reasonably fast (much faster than the year it took me to feel comfortable with Finale back in the day). At the same time, I don’t disagree with some of your points:

  • “Flow” is also not something I use. The good thing is that for probably two decades, all my music (even the 2-4 hour stuff) is in one “movement” as such. So I just ignore the whole “flow” term. As a gynecologist by day, I’m not taken with the term since it has a very different meaning in my world, and is something that most women view negatively. Just saying.
  • Complexity: Dorico is certainly very capable. But I just started composing a work for string quartet after a hiatus of around a month since my last work, and I had to refamiliarize myself with how to do some things, and still consult the online forum a lot for solutions. It’s daunting for me to have to remember where the option is to display rests in empty measures (something I only do while editing/composing since it affects how Insert works across an entire system). Having a lot of preferences means a lot of complexity since they are organized in different batches (layout options, notation options, engraving options…etc). I get that there is a real distinction between layout and engraving, but as a composer rather than an engraver, this always drives me meshuggeh.
  • At first, I would have agreed with you about the tone of some of the posters here. It did seem condescending at times, and, in all honesty, cult-like. But I’ve mostly found a very supportive community here. I suspect part of it has to do with the difference between the US and UK; having been all over the UK many times for work, I’m pretty aware of the different approaches and conventions in general life and medical terminology, but I wasn’t really prepared for the differences in terms of music notation and also how things come across in a forum setting. Once I realized it was mostly a matter of differences in how things are stated among different countries (and there certainly are more countries here than just the US and UK, which is a strength of the community), it really wasn’t a factor for me anymore. In other words, I’d give it a chance. I’ve seen a ton of very exceptional help provided here, and I find the forum more useful for figuring things out than the online manual, which is not as good as Finale’s was IMHO.
  • A lot of the difference between Dorico and Finale has to do with Dorico working more like a sequencer (ie, you can forget about having to input rests, and also easily move entire sequences of notes around like dragging notes in a sequencer), whereas Finale worked more like a word processor. Back in the days of Finale 3.5, I thought was a very elegant program. Until it wasn’t. In contrast, once I did things more like a sequencer, Dorico made a lot more sense to me, and it works really well for someone like me who composes minimalist music with a lot of repetitions. In Finale, I’d copy a sequence then paste it or use the option-drag method if I remember correctly. With Dorico, I just select notes and hit R and it’s done. Very elegant solution.

I did not know about locking in Force Duration until I read it today on this page from Ben’s response to you. So there will always be things to learn about Dorico, and I’d say the same about Finale. Now that I haven’t used Finale for a new work in two years, I find that I’m still hearing about some functionality that I never had known to exist in that program. It’s just inevitable that one won’t know about everything a complex program can do. I’m sure I can think of things in Excel or Word that I wish I had known years ago.

12

As a former Finale user, I had my doubts about Dorico. For the most part, my doubts have been completely resolved. I still have a few but that no longer remains in forethought as I have seen some very responsive changes since transitioning at the end of August 2024 to Dorico. There were a lot of forum requests about wanting a grid and rulers in Engrave mode. We now have it. There were other things that have become so common in my use or that have nothing directly to do with my genre of work that I’ve forgotten about them.

My point is that the Dorico development team is responsive to user requests, maybe not on our timeline, but responsive nonetheless. As long as we continue to share what we need, I suspect that we will eventually get it. We just need to remember that development priorities may not be the same as our priorities due to number of reasons including some that are well beyond how many users want something in particular.

Dorico is also a relatively new musical notation platform and doesn’t yet have 30 or 40 or more years that other applications have had to finesse their product. Patience is the key. As a rather impatient person, myself, I sometimes forget this so it’s always good to have a reminder. Hang in there. You. might find that you do end up liking this program.

13

I’ve never had any trouble entering a dotted half-note in 6/8 or 9/8 time.

Nevertheless, I’ve struggled to find the right settings in the note grouping options for C-based time signatures.

There are still the odd hiccups, particularly in 3/8, which require using the ‘force duration’ button, and, like you, I find it annoying having to go back and correct my input because it’s very difficult to predict what Dorico will or won’t choose, despite the option settings.

A while ago, I asked for these options to be made available solely as a user choice (a small tick box); that way, those who wish to follow Gould would have to use the option settings that produce the current result. Those who do not want this and prefer free input, as offered by Finale or Sibelius, would simply leave the box unticked. It could be the other way round: a tick box for those who want free notation. Indeed, whilst Gould’s principles may be understandable for a modern edition, these automatic features can become counterproductive when it comes to notating exactly what the composer wrote (for an Urtext edition, for example). Yet this is precisely my field (the 18th century), which requires this freedom

14

I had to use (the latest version of) Sibelius for an old project, and I had not used Sibelius for almost 3 years. It was truly an unpleasant experience, and I realised then just how superior Dorico is (even if it has its small ‘quirks’). The engraving is horrifying in Sibelius compared to Dorico.

Here is a small sample from the “What is new in …”

image
image626×750 37 KB

that shows they have absolutely no intention of making this software even 1/100th of what Dorico is. (Changing to @NorFont.com excellent fonts solves most problems that the Sibelius team cannot, apparently, see. Sadly, I’m stuck with the default fonts for the current project.)

TLDR; Dorico is far, far superior, and well worth learning, even if some aspects feel “odd” at start.

15

If you haven’t done so yet, it’s worth taking some time going through all of the layout/notation/engraving options. I recognize full well what a daunting suggestion this is. The only reason that I say it is because what you are perceiving as one of Dorico’s greatest drawbacks is actually one of its greatest strengths: global consistency. If you want something a particular way, odds are that there is a way in the options to set that at a global level, with the obvious benefit that it prevents you from having to do it manually every time. Then you would only have to override for exceptions, rather than the rule (as it were). It sounds like things are currently configured backwards for your needs. A little time sorting these niggles out would allow Dorico to work for you rather than against you, so please pop on here when you’re stymied by something! “Hey, I want ‘X’ to be the default notation; can someone tell me if this is possible and where to find the setting?” Odds are you’ll have your answer in just a minute or two.

16

I’d been following Daniel’s Dorico blog almost from the beginning, i.e., before Dorico was released, and had always planned to switch or at least check it out. Version 1 didn’t do it for me, so I waited until I felt they’d caught up with the features I used most often. I’d completely forgotten about it until MakeMusic (or whoever owns it now) decided to file 13 they whole thing.

All that to say, I came in cold with Dorico. Once I’d finished my last project with Finale, I dove in head-first and began a new project with Dorico. And… I did what I’d always done, read and watched videos just enough to get started, then when stumped on how to do things, I worked around and bent the software to my will to get the look I wanted.

Now, almost 18 months later? I refuse to open that first project since I know for a fact that I did things there that sort of worked at the time, but were definitely not the “Dorico way”, nor were they the easiest. By far. And I haven’t opened Finale to actually adjust a piece since that last one 18 months ago.

Keep at it. Watch the videos (including the excellent Udemy course) and read (almost) every topic in this forum. I learn something new every time I come here. Back before 2012 or so, Finale’s forum was every bit as good as this one, with great people always ready and willing to help (I’m looking at you, Buzz), but… sigh. Anyway, don’t lose hope, because it all comes together and just clicks.

17

As much as Steinberg would like Dorico to be the choice of notation app for nearly everyone, in some ways they may have boxed themselves in without intending to. While I think Gould’s guide is quite good, I also find that it is certainly not the end all to be all. And, I do quite well understand needing to be able to set “things” so that a given composer’s work can be notated as originally intended. This is where Dorico could really shine by choice.

For example, Force Duration should be able to be set as default and turn on the moment we begin note entry. Likewise, when I select a half note and the dot, it should give me exactly what I asked for (dotted half) and not what it thinks (half tied to quarter) is best based on rules from Gould or any other source. Also as a classically trained organist, I have great respect for and the desire to only use Urtext editions of all organ composers because some publishers seem to be keen on over-editing organ music. So, I share this because I find that your request is certainly valid and carries value with a subset of Dorico users.

18

When you set this, it’s only just 1 click to have that active during your session.

(I was curious, but you have to do it each session, not once for each project)

19

Yes, @TonH, I often forget to click it before starting then realize my oversight when I start seeing what I don’t want. For me, some sort of persistence beyond just the current session would be quite helpful. After all, is it not the purpose of most software to minimize repetitive tasks from the user? Maybe not but maybe so.

20

Sometimes not, sometimes so :slight_smile:

In this sentence , I had to do the repetive task of pressing shift to get a capital as first letter. But I’m glad I have to, because sometimes I do want to start with a lowercase letter …

Having said that, I don’t oppose to a preference to make forced duration a default, or to stick to current setting in the project when saved (which would allow for forced duration project templates)