Compose to audio/video in Dorico

Dorico
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Hi all,

I am working on a project arranging some parts for a chamber group to play along with an artist who is performing existing songs. I have the audio tracks of the exact version of the songs that they will perform, and was hoping to be able to write the string parts to the audio track in Dorico. I know that Dorico doesn’t have the option (hopefully some day) to directly import audio, so I have tried to convert the audio tracks to video in order to import to Dorico. However, I have had some difficulties in getting the start of the video track to line up with the Dorico playback. Does anyone have any tips or tricks to making this more effective? Or should I just cut my losses and score to the audio in Logic and then transcibe/export to Dorico for engraving?

It would be great to have the ability to import audio tracks; could be useful for arranging (like this), transcribing, or composing new music with fixed audio recordings. I know Staffpad (see video below) has this feature, and I really like how it also displays the audio that is imported graphically, which would be a good visual indicator/cue for performers playing a new music piece with a backing track. Unfortunately I do not have an iPad, so I am unable to try Staffpad, but would love for something like this to come to Dorico. Hopefully this is on the developer’s radar for a future update!

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We do plan to add audio tracks to Dorico in future, but it requires changes not only to Dorico itself but also to the audio engine that Dorico depends upon. At the moment, there’s no functionality provided by the audio engine to handle audio tracks, so we need the time and expertise of our colleagues in the Cubase engineering team to provide this underlying technology before we can work on these features. I think there is a huge opportunity for us to provide assistance for transcription tasks once this basic capability is in place, but I can’t say when we will be able to achieve it.

For the time being, you might well find the capabilities of the DAW in terms of helping you identify the beats and in mapping the tempo (and perhaps even identifying harmonies etc.) a more efficient way of getting started with this project. Once you have the musical structure in place, you can then bring that over to Dorico via MIDI.

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Sounds like a daunting task, but I will look
forward to the day that it gets done! Thank you for all that you do, Dorico is truly a great program and a pleasure to compose with.