Composers Toolbox Forum Survey

Hello All—
Composers Toolbox Forum released the results of their annual poll about music notation software. The results were indeed intriguing!

Dorico made a very strong showing and I suggest peeking at the graphs.
https://composerstoolbox.com/2019/08/06/a-guide-to-music-notation-software/

At the risk of gloating, it seems we are indeed the envy (or at least curiosity) of many:

Finally!

Difficult to know how representative the sample set is, but that’s a strong showing by Dorico, for sure.

Very interesting results. Only 2% of Dorico users intending to leave it – which makes sense, given how relatively young it is, people using it have made an intentional choice (not to mention, its great!)

And Dorico is the overwhelming favorite target for where people want to switch to.

I suspect there will be a tipping point where people switch to Dorico in droves. There’s enough gaps in functionality to keep lots of people from switching right now – not general functionality, but specific to certain workflows. But each release will fill some of those gaps and we’ll see waves of new users, until one day Dorico becomes the asteroid that wipes out the notation dinosaurs. Except for Lilypond, because open source software always has its place in the world.

I’ve recently started engraving for a choral publisher that is coming on board with Dorico. At present, I’m the only engraver using it, and no Dorico submissions from composers yet. So at the moment, I’m doing extra work to import everything from XML, finish it in Dorico, and submit the PDF proofs. That’ll change very soon, I expect, and is already beginning to do so.

It’s a Catch-22. Some publishers aren’t yet accepting Dorico files because their composers aren’t using it, and vice versa. I’m glad this particular publisher is looking forward!

Of the respondents I think it’s fascinating that nearly a quarter of all finale users and nearly half of all Sibelius users intend to switch in the near future and of those, overwhelmingly they intend to switch to Dorico. If this sample of 315 people is at all representative of a larger trend, those companies should be very concerned indeed. I have a feeling the D3 will skew the results even more.

looks like significantly little interest in moving to Notion.

When Dan Lis published these results, I tweeted a couple of things about them, here and here. 99% of (the admittedly small number of) Dorico users who responded would recommend the software to other musicians, which is something I’m delighted by.

…as you should be!

Dorico is so cool that when I’m tired of composing with it I come to the forum to procrastinate.
Ok, I should get back to work, I guess…

I confess I check this forum all too frequently lol. In my defense (at least this is what I tell myself) I do consider it a mild form of “professional development” because I learn new things on the forum every day which allows me to do my job better.

I check it at least twice every day, once in the morning to see what happened overnight, and again in the evening to see what is happening during the day. I read every new post that Daniel makes, even if the topic is of no particular interest, and I read every new thread that is related to my work. I used to try to read every thread, period, but that quickly got to be way too much.

–Len

I do the same with similar motivations. But, then, I’m trying to adapt to using Dorico esclusively by composing with it & learning as much as I can by reading as many posts as I can that are relevant to the specific tasks at hand in my music writing.

All in all, I could hardly abstain from checking this very valuable forum.

Cheers to all & thank you very much or being here & sharing you experiences

Congrats Daniel, Ulf and everyone on a strong showing. I was mostly blown away by the ‘ease of use’ questions and how Dorico did there. It certainly mirrors my own experience. I recently had to assist on a project in some other notation software (which I used to use regularly and am quite proficient on) and it was jarring how awkward it all felt compared to what I’ve been used to with Dorico.

I check the forum with what I think is pretty high frequency, yet there’s hardly an issue I can help on that has not already been tackled by Leo, Marc or Dan… I don’t know how these guys get any work done…

I do the same with similar motivations. But, then, I’m trying to adapt to using Dorico esclusively by composing with it & learning as much as I can by reading as many posts as I can that are relevant to the specific tasks at hand in my music writing.

All in all, I could hardly abstain from checking this very valuable forum.

Cheers to all & thank you very much, Forum Posters & Dorico Team, for being here & sharing you experiences & help.