C14 Score Editor - "page text", page numbers

Cubase
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I’ve by now (sadly) realized that the C14 score editor, despite the huge improvements over previous versions, surprisingly lacks some fairly basic features or, at least, makes them quite difficult to locate for those accustomed to previous versions.

For example, I still haven’t figured out how to have the song title appear at the top of each score page, as was the case in C13 using the “page text” tool.
Nor have I figured out how to position the page numbers at the bottom of the page instead of the top, or in the center or right instead of the left. Furthermore, while in C13 I could easily include the total number in the page numbering (e.g. “page 7 of 12”), in C14 I can’t do the same.

Can anyone give me some help ?

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Only Steinberg can help here by programming these things and making them available to us. This means that moving or changing the position of the project information is (currently) not possible.

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can you please elaborate what you consider as “huge improvements”, besides the new look, which is nice indeed?

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I’m not a “real” musician: I have very little musical knowledge and, above all, I can’t read nor write sheet music.
So I realise that my ability to evaluate software dedicated to musical scores is extremely limited; and since I’ve read and heard many positive comments from knowledgeable people about the new features of C14 Score, I believe that the substantial improvements have been actually made.
Anyway, expressions like “huge improvements” and similar were used repeatedly by the company itself in introducing version 14.

However, despite those improvements, Cubase developers seem to have completely forgotten, while working at C14, the needs and habits of all those users (few?) who, like me, have limited musical knowledge and were familiar with the scoring features (with related… oddities) of the previous versions.
And I find that move quite surprising and very unfortunate. Obviously innovations bring notable changes, but adding or modifying existing features is radically different from totally removing them without providing any alternatives.

I want to hope (in vain?) that this mistake will be corrected in a C14 update, without forcing users to purchase a new version of the program; because in that case the bad move would be compounded by another one, somehow even more… sad.

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A user with very much musical knowledge, me, comes to the same conclusions.
A very premature release of an editor with a completely new concept, awkward workflow compared to the rest of Cubase, lacking countless features.
The idea of combining two conceptually totally different programs was doomed to failure in the first place. The update development within one year brought some improvements, but if the update rate stays like this, we have to overcome many years to come close again to what we had with the old score editor.
For those of us who used to work with the old score editor on a daily basis, the loss of functionality is hard to accept.
And please spare me with “you can still use Cubase 13” - you cannot go from 13 to 14 and back. As soon as the new score editor was used, the midi data is somehow “spoiled” and won´t work in C13 any more.

They should have kept the old editor available, while the new one grows to a serious tool.
For me this situation means the worst workflow killer in my 30 years with this programm…..

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These types of things in Dorico can only be changed in the page template editor. It is one of those features that would probably be quite complicated to bring over to Cubase since they would probably have to redo the UI for it.

Until then (if they do at all), it is of course possible to export the score to Dorico and make those changes there.

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I guess that is a quite useful and realistic advice.
So, perhaps, it would have been much better if Steinberg had taken care of perfecting the “old” Cubase editor (for example by eliminating some of its well know flaws and perhaps adding something to improve the workflow), while frankly, openly inviting any more demanding users to try that “export the score to Dorico and make changes there” route by means of the Dorico free version.

Instead of making more or less hasty software transfers between significantly different programs and claiming to pass off the resulting C14 as a mature product from the scoring point of view.

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For me, the Dorico export is one of the best features that Cubase 14 has brought. This allows me to create arrangements in Cubase using my usual workflow. When I get to the point where I want to create the scores, I export the relevant tracks to Dorico, where I can customize the score much better and more individually than Cubase ever could before C13.

However, since the Dorico export from Cubase goes far beyond the existing musicXML, Cubase needs to have a kind of “Dorico engine” built in. However, continuing to maintain the old score editor in parallel would have involved a significant programming effort.
My hope is that the Cubase team at Steinberg will at least expand and improve the Dorico-based score editor to the point where the functionality and flexibility of the old score editor will be available again.

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MusicXML was never perfect. I don’t know how much you’ve used it to go between programs but it almost always changes the display significantly and you end up spending a lot of time cleaning up, and you can end up losing some things and have to fix them manually. Interchange between any two programs is always a pain because you always waste a significant amount of time getting things to look close to how they already did, and re-proofing things to make sure that nothing has disappeared that you might not have noticed.

The difference in Cubase 14 is it is the entire Dorico program inside there, so it can export actual Dorico files, and when you import the Dorico project file into Dorico you are guaranteed as a starting point they will look 100% identical to how they did in Cubase - no difference at all. This would not have been possible without the Dorico project file support, which was in turn only possible by putting the Dorico engine itself inside Cubase like they did.

As @P.A.T said above It is not viable for an organization the size of Steinberg’s to maintain two notation products (the Cubase Score Editor and Dorico) for an indefinite period of time. I’m sure replacing the Cubase Score Editor was already on the radar 13 years ago as an eventual goal when they hired on the team to build Dorico.

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I fully understand (and largely agree with) your considerations.
Undoubtedly, using both programs one can achieve far superior results than the old editor allowed.

And since Dorico is also available in a free version (which, I hope, can still produce better and more flexible scores than the old Cubase editor), the free Dorico could very well be considered a useful, if not indispensable, “extension” of C14 for those whose workflow includes score creation.

All this, however, strengthens my opinion: Steinberg should have made these news very explicit, clearly communicating to users that, in order to improve Cubase’s score performance, they had decided to abandon the old editor all together and focus on a fruitful connection between Cubase and Dorico.
In other words, while announcing the new Cubase release and its novelties, they should have said to Cubase users: in C14 Score you will NO longer find certain features BUT you will be able to find them, along with other much better ones, by exporting the file from Cubase to Dorico and using the free version of the latter. Thus making it very clear, from the start, that the “new” C14 editor, by itself, could NOT provide a “self-sufficient” editing environment capable of producing the same (or better) results than those obtainable with earlier Cubase versions.
A perhaps less effective path in terms of marketing and advertising, but probably much more appreciated by existing customers and users (and possible future… upgrade buyers).

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I’d like to add to this discussion that the combination of a full-fledged DAW/Cubase with good and flexible notation features is invaluable and unique. This allows you to fully arrange and edit music/tracks in a DAW simultaneously using musical notation. (I feel like the Steinberg people underestimate this.)
Exporting to Dorico loses important DAW features that many (?) simply need in their musical work, so this isn’t a viable option.

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absolutely!
I mainly use score to arrange my music. With the new score editor it became almost impossible. I have to use the key editor all the time to edit the notation - this sounds wrong, and it is wrong! Selecting, copying, changing the view to see more bars at once, the whole editing process has become extremly time consuming and annoying.

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I knew that document, Paul.
Maybe I’m wrong, but It doesn’t seem (to me) to clearly state that to get scores equal to those available with C13 you must export to Dorico.

And I don’t seem to see any reference to the free Dorico SE, nor any reassurance that the C14+DoricoSE combination can provide the same scoring features as C13 and earlier versions (plus obviously others, which the Cubase user hardly can miss because he doesn’t expect to find them).
The message reads more like: “If you’re not satisfied with what’s available in C14 score, you can always export to Dorico and use its much more powerful features”.

Furthermore, it seems to me that the document clearly suggests (“Provided you have Cubase 12 or later…”) that you should use earlier versions, which in turn is quite inconvenient, especially for those accustomed to editing music directly in the score and obviously prefer to have a single project file.

In short, even assuming the best intentions (and I have no reason to doubt them), the message is rather ambiguous, far from the clarity I was talking about.

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This is difficult I think to word this more directly because what is “equal”? It depends on what people are doing and what they are needing. It might be more accurate to say to get the types of customization options for scores that you had in C13 you must export to Dorico. Because in terms of default spacing and layout, it is hands-down better, and the default appearance of Cubase 13 (and earlier) scores is a major issue and for me an untenable timesink to manually move everything on the page around (every single note and every single other object) to get it looking half decent. At the same time I understand where people are coming from in not wanting to separate DAW from notation quite so greatly.

My background is that I started off mostly as a self-taught composer and then began to take composition lessons and went back to university to study composition properly. I started as a teenager with an old program called Musicator (which doesn’t exist anymore) that combined piano roll and notation into one. I stayed on it for a very long time (comfortable with it and unwanting to change) and only finally grudgingly moved from it in 2006 to Cubase 4 when I realized it was starting to limit me.

About a year after that I started to take music composition and orchestration lessons privately. I tried to do my work in the Cubase 4 Score Editor but my teacher told me it was all terrible and basically made me buy Finale. This was a significant improvement in the appearance of my scores but started me on a path of being very frustrated at having to use two different programs instead of one unified music program - DAW vs notation and never the twain shall meet.

I made one other big attempt to use the Score Editor a few years later in 2012 when I was working on my first orchestral work that was to be performed, and I wanted to write it with my sample libraries in Cubase but do the final score in Sibelius (which I had moved to from Finale by that time). So I did a temporary score in the Cubase Score Editor, adding display quantize everywhere, and finally exporting it and bringing it into Sibelius. It was a huge amount of effort and at the end I’m not sure it was really worth it. I had to do hacking of the XML I recall to bring in the tremolos properly because Sibelius imported all the three-stroke tremolos as one-stroke. I also recall lots of manual work with the trills. At the end of it all I might just as well have renotated it in Sibelius by hand - it would have been less work.

There was one other student who started his undergrad at my university using the Cubase Score Editor. He was big on it from what I recall and felt like he could do anything with it. By the next year he had changed to Sibelius - I didn’t get the details, but I can assume due to pressure from his professors who could see that his scores just didn’t have the same polish as those of the other students. Unfortunately the presentation matters. In academic settings you are expected to have polished scores, and your peers do. It looks quite badly if you are the only one who doesn’t.

When Dorico came out (and I moved to it), one of the things I was most excited about it is that I thought finally, this is something that can bring DAW and notation together again, so I could reclaim what I felt I had once before with Musicator and had lost. And it has actually done that in most respects, with full piano roll editing in Cubase style and CC’s, just missing the ability to work with audio tracks and things of that sort, and automation capabilities.

My point of all those is from my perspective, it was as though Cubase never had a score editor before Cubase 14. It did, theoretically, but it just was not anything that I could use in actuality. The default formatting was just not anywhere near good enough, and if I start having to move around every single element on the page by hand, it becomes untenable. I just don’t have the free time to do that. So anytime I would write things in Cubase (13 or earlier) that would have to get performed I’d manually renotate it in Dorico, rinse and repeat. But now I don’t have to do that. And the default formatting done by the Dorico engine is good enough that if I need to print a quick part and it is something simple, I might be able to do it entirely from Cubase 14 without having to apologize for the result. I could not say the same of Cubase 13 and earlier versions (at least, not without putting in much more work than I would be willing to do).

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That’s exactly what I meant when, wanting to be concise, I said “equal.”
I actually should have put the term in quotation marks.
However, in my partial defence, I might point out that if you don’t have the types of customisation options for scores you had before, it’s very difficult to achieve, starting from the same MIDI tracks, the same printout.

I thank you for your long and interesting explanation, from which I learned (among other things) that your musical culture is enormously superior to mine and that what you consider “composition” is, as well, light-years away from what I am capable of understanding and doing.

Nevertheless, maybe being a bit presumptuous, I think there are quite a few Cubase users at a (low) level similar to mine. And that’s precisely why I think Steinberg, in planning and introducing the transition to Cubase’s new score editor, could have (and perhaps should have) given a little more thought to musically “ignorant” people like me.

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I read the report with interest and agree with many of its points, but I find this sentence a bit harsh.

For many users, including myself, the old Cubase music editor was a frequently used and easy-to-use tool – until I switched to Dorico.

However, my target audience was different from the university environment – ​​I mainly write music for choirs and small ensembles. I would rather agree with a formulation like: in my view, Cubase was never professional notation software. And neither is C14. But exporting data from a professional DAW (Cubase) to professional notation software (Dorico) has finally become easy.

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I never said anything like this, and certainly didn’t mean to suggest it.

There are brilliant composers of many types working in many genres, from many different cultures, I don’t compare them side by side. Some don’t work with notation at all and do everything by ear, that doesn’t lessen them in any way.

I’m just talking about the requirements and the pressures specifically in the field of new music, or “academic music” as some people call it. Nothing more.

I also have some experience with media scoring (which is entirely different from academic music), and am in many chats with people who work in that field. Occasionally there are people there who have dabbled with using Cubase Score Editor and sometimes used it to print out the occasional chart, but even that is quite rare, and most charts for film seem to be generated in dedicated notation software too. In these chats, I’ve rarely seen anything good said about old versions of the score editor, and a bunch of times have had negative experiences relayed instead.

I’m also not saying it wasn’t good enough for what you were doing. I can see all sorts of situations where it could be satisfactory - producing charts for people that you are in a band with, for instance. But simply speaking of my experience in my specific area, it was not.

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It was not intended to be harsh. I was simply saying that I personally did not benefit in any way from the score editor being present in previous versions. Even in cases where I used it to do an intermediate score and XML out, given the XML conversion issues, I could have gotten the same result in less time by doing the re-entry by hand in the final notation program. I used the score editor XML → notation program route because I thought it would be faster, but it was not.

And for my later pieces where I worked in both programs, I pretended the score editor in Cubase did not exist and did the note entry again by hand in the other program by having both screens open at once side by side, or occasionally brought MIDI over. This proved to be the fastest and least problematic way to get the notated score I wanted.

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Thanks all for your feedback.

To get back to the original question: There is currently no way to show the project title in the header of the pages following the first page. As it stands, this does indeed require an export to Dorico and setting the Flow title.
There is a further aspect to this: In Dorico, users creating a new project and indicating that it contains a single flow only, will end up using the “First” page template for all pages. This would probably satisfy some of MarcoRo’s requirements, however we need to work out if and how we can make this available as an option to the Score Editor in the long term. I’ll put this on our roadmap for consideration.

The new Score Editor is not a fully fledged notation software, and it doesn’t intend to be. We aim to improve editing capabilities to allow it to be a powerful midi editor. For some aspects of writing a score, Dorico will remain the flexible tool of choice. Equally, many users won’t ever need to go there. I’m afraid we can’t fulfill everyone’s wishlist, but please do continue to post your feedback of where you hit limitations or usability issues.

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