I guess you missed my follow up
An official Dorico ROADMAP from Steinberg would be useful.
From what Daniel said at the launch event on Tuesday (to a question, after the webcast finished), there are no plans to produce a printed manual.
I can see why - things will be changing very quickly at this point, and having written a book on using Cubase, even going from version 6 to 7 or 7 to 8 meant a complete check of everything, and a lot of things changing between versions; to go from 7 to 8 took me a long full-time week to check every feature as written in the book and update all the screen shots, and another 3 days of re-writing where procedures, shortcuts or workflow had changed significantly.
I’d love to produce a similar book for Dorico (and am planning to do so at some point in the future), but doing so now would mean it would be out of date by the time it was proofed and released, I think. I may produce a “getting started” guide, but a full manual for every feature would be an undertaking that would be out of date too quickly to warrant the considerable work (originally writing the Cubase book took me a year of all my spare time in evenings and weekends, and that hasn’t come near paying for itself at anything like a decent rate!)
There is, of course, the hope that the online help is created in a manner that would lend itself to being the skeleton for a book, but I’ve not seen it as yet; I ordered a boxed copy of Dorico and it’s not coming until Monday.
Hi Michael,
We are certainly taking all feedback on board and working hard to ensure we deliver first the most important missing features to our customers. I am sure you appreciate that it would unwise of us at this point to start promising particular features by specific times, especially as we remain resolute in our decision to implement features intelligently and thoroughly. I can assure you that no-one is more acutely aware of what features are missing from Dorico in 1.0 than us. Improving performance is certainly one key area we are currently addressing.
Dorico’s online help will continue to be improved and additional resources will become available over time, though there is currently no plan to create a printed manual, as per Steinberg’s official policy. This is both due to wanting to remain as environmentally-friendly as possible, and also because printed documentation quickly becomes out-of-date, especially at this time when Dorico will be maturing so rapidly.
Can I please urge you to send us any crash logs your system generates when you experience crashes with Dorico? That will help us to identify and fix the root cause of the problems you’re experiencing.
Many thanks for being such an early-user of Dorico; we definitely remain confident that Dorico will become people’s ‘go to’ scoring software and are already working hard on the first of the promised updates that will get you closer to completing the leap from your current software.
Best wishes,
Anthony
A decent Cubase-style PDF manual would be great.
I wish people would stop comparing Dorico to a car purchase. Actually years ago I replaced my 12-year-old Honda with a new auto from a well known U.S. manufacturer. It was ultimately not a reliable auto with a defect in engine cooling that twice caused the engine to cut out, once on my way back from NC to DC.
Second, I have been (and still am) a Finale customer since their first version (and believe me, that was a combination of then-revolutionary new features and revolutionary hair-tearing moments). If you have not frequented the Finale forums lately you may have missed that Finale is not–for some of its users–problem-free even after 28 years. I suspect Sibelius is–for some of its users–still frustrating at certain points.
I have great hopes for Dorico and have confidence in the team developing it. I am proud to be able to support the project and start learning the software as it grows. Yes, I will still be using (still must use) Finale for almost all my production work until Dorico adds certain functions such as improved percussion (still bedeviling Finale if to a lesser extent) and I become more competent with the Steinberg software. As much as I hope some of MichaelSel’s suggestions will be adopted soon, I will wait for an implementation that is well conceived and well implemented rather than a rush job.
I would expect a great many of these to be addressed in the 1.x update cycle, absolutely, though I can’t give you a cast-iron guarantee about all of them (things like transposition, filtering, adjusting staff spacing etc. are slam dunks, however). A couple of them are possible already, e.g. being able to change the size of the staff anywhere in the score, and respelling accidentals, though of course it can be hard to figure that out with the documentation in a somewhat incomplete state.
I assume you will also be contacting the developer of your existing scoring program and asking them whether they will be adding every feature that Dorico has that their application does not in a series of free updates within the next 6-12 months, as well? Just to make sure we’re holding all software developers to the same standard, of course!
Some of us couldn’t care less what other developers do or don’t do. We have no plans to use a future version of their software ever.
These days, an EPUB manual would be more useful. Searchable, reformats itself for whatever you read it on, etc.