Back in December, in response to a user who was asking for a faster turnaround between updates (for the record, the median interval between updates is just 9 weeks, which is already pretty fast), I collated a list of all of the Dorico releases to date, which you can find here.
To that list of 17 releases from October 2016 to October 2019 we can now add three more releases:
3.1: 16 Jan 2020 (14 weeks)
3.1.10: 25 Feb 2020 (6 weeks)
3.5: 20 May 2020 (12 weeks)
That’s a total of 20 releases since October 2016, of which we have asked for additional money for three of them. And of those 20 updates, you can count on the fingers of one hand those updates that have not added significant new functionality in their own right, being focused purely on maintenance/bug fixing.
So I feel pretty good about the value for money that we have delivered over the past four years. If you bought Dorico 1.0 at the crossgrade price of $279 in October 2016 and have bought each update upon its release, not taking advantage of any of the time-limited sales offers on the update at any point, then your total expenditure would be around $540 for 20 releases adding literally hundreds of features. And we have always made available a 30-day trial version at every point except for the very short window of a couple of weeks after each of the three paid updates, so that every customer can make his or her own judgement over the quality and suitability of the software for his or her own requirements.
To put that in perspective, that’s 43 months. If you had been paying a monthly subscription to Avid at $20 every month since then for Sibelius Ultimate, you would have spent $860. And here is the sum total of features you would have received in that time: multiple staff sizes within the same project; dockable Inspector; magnetic glissando lines; Cloud Sharing; create text/lines/slurs across multiple staves at once; improved note spacing; switching to a new version of Qt (marketed as a feature requiring 400+ changes); Review Mode (ostensibly a single button that prevents editing of the score); loop playback and scrub playback; minor MusicXML improvements; smart MIDI import; automatic staff spacing; ties in second endings; laissez vibrer ties; some new built-in house styles. Obviously that’s building on the foundation laid by the previous 20+ years’ development of the software, but some of those updates have been hailed as being really significant, though the sum total of those updates is smaller than any one of the three paid updates we have released.
What about if you had been a Finale user for that whole time? When Dorico 1.0 was released in October 2016, the current version of Finale was Finale 25, released that past August. Let’s assume you bought that at the crossgrade price, like Dorico, so that would have been $199. You would have ponied up $149 for the update to Finale 26 two years later in October 2018, so you would have spent about $350. And the sum total of the new features you would have received in the five maintenance updates to Finale 25 and three maintenance updates to Finale 26 amount to some minor interface tweaks; a lot of improvements to MusicXML export that are focused on MakeMusic’s other application, SmartMusic; articulations that don’t collide with each other; a Go To Bar dialog box; and a lot of internal refactoring that bring little additional immediate user-visible benefit. Again, this is building on the 30 year legacy of that application, yes, which is mature and powerful. But the $149 upgrade fee for Finale 25 users to go to Finale 26 to get hold of those non-colliding articulations (a new feature in a mature music notation application celebrating its 30th anniversary!) and a Go To Bar dialog looks pretty high to me, compared to the $59 cost of the Dorico 3.5 update for Dorico 3 users.
And please don’t misunderstand me: I know people who work at both of those companies, and I am reasonably certain that they are doing the best they can given their available resources and expertise, the age of their respective codebases, quality of tooling, level of support from their corporate parent, and so on and so on. Software development is hard, and I would not presume to know precisely what factors influence why some products evolve at a slower pace than others, though I’ve been around the block enough to have a pretty good idea.
But let’s be realistic: there’s one company working in the field of music notation software who’s pushing it forwards. And if you look at the trajectory of Dorico’s development over the past three and a half years versus its main commercial competitors, there’s really no comparison in terms of the return on your own personal investment.
I would happily put every single one of the comparable features in Dorico, Sibelius and Finale up against each other and feel confident that not only have we built hundreds of features over the past three and a half years to close any functional gaps that may exist between Dorico and those applications, but we have built features that are superior to the comparable features in our more mature competitors. And there is nothing in those more mature competitors to match features like condensing, or Dorico’s DTP page layout features, or open meter support, or support for microtonality, or multi-movement works, or linked guitar tablature, or smart figured bass, or automatic harmonics, or trills that correctly influence subsequent accidentals, or harp pedaling support, and on, and on.
I know that €60 is not nothing, particularly at the moment when everything is very difficult – not only financially – for not only musicians but pretty much everybody. But look at it this way: given that both Sibelius and Finale are still available and to all appearances successful, the market will apparently stand both a much slower pace of development and higher prices than we at Steinberg are providing and asking for. So isn’t Dorico 3.5 actually pretty great value for money?
