It would be good for the Dorico Team to follow the needs of professionals who require new, efficient, and creative features in the programme. I have been working with MakeMusic Finale for 30 years, and the time has come for a change due to the lack of development in the Finale programme. From my tests, it appears that Dorico still has significant shortcomings when it comes to professional compositional work. For example, most articulations are not played back, even by Iconica Opus (there are no articulations for many playing techniques), such as con sordino, col legno, or artificial harmonics for string instruments, whose range is definitely too low, frullato for wind instruments, and many, many others. There are also many missing sounds, for instance, the celesta is absent, and instead of its sound, a piano appears; there is a lack of many sounds and performance techniques popular in modern orchestral percussion groups. I do not understand this at all, because sometimes it would be enough just to move the instrument range up (harmonics). They do not have to be perfect, but they should at least play. Since Iconica Opus is Steinberg’s leading orchestral set, why is this set of instruments so “limited,” inadequate for contemporary needs? Why, for example, is there no empty (clean) barline, instead of the complicated method of hiding it? I believe Dorico aspires to be the main programme for composers, so it should work on many aspects essential to contemporary compositional work.
Welcome to the (Dorico) Forum.
Most of the issues that you raise are a consequence of limitations in sound libraries. The Dorico team has no control over these.
If you have a sound library capable of playing col legno (there are many), and your expression map is correctly configured, when you add the instruction to the score the playback will be correct. That is Dorico’s job.
I don’t understand - what is the musical purpose of an absent barline?
I’m sure that more contemporary features are in the team’s development pipeline, but until contemporary composers can actually agree on a set of standard features, I suspect progress will be slow. More so if playback is your priority.
I don’t have a license to Iconica Opus, so I can’t comment on that, but a Celesta is available in Iconica Sketch, which as I understand is a cut-down version of Opus, so could it be the instrument isn’t missing, but you have a mismatch in setup?
Welcome to the forum, @Osada_Ryszard!
Have you tried selecting one and pressing Delete? Does that accomplish what you’re after?
“Musical” purpose, probably none. But there are some practical considerations. I engrave hymns for a company that requires my final product sent to them to be musicxml files so they can produce dynamic scores on their website. (MyHymnary). At the end of a phrase, even if it happens in the middle of a measure, the xml file needs to have a hidden bar line in order for their system to work. (Yes, maybe their system needs changing, but that’s neither here or there). While musicxml does implement the “none” tag for bar lines, Dorico does not. Even if I use the work arounds available to hide barlines in Dorico, it does me no good when it comes to xml output. This is just one example, but I’m sure there are more. If I were doing everything in Dorico, I’m not sure I’d need a blank bar line, but given that the tag exists in xml, there must be more than just my example as to why it would be a good thing to have available in Dorico.
As said by others, most of the shortcomings you list are in the sound libraries that Dorico uses, rather than limitations of Dorico itself. If your sound library has con sord, legno, etc, then it is very straightforward for Dorico to accommodate them in playback.
Most of your problems would be solved by using Noteperformer. If you have any of the Garritan libraries left over from Finale, you can use them, too; though while they excel in having a wide range of patches, their realism is hampered somewhat.
I’ll agree that perhaps Steinberg’s sample library division should have considered the nascent Dorico more closely when they developed Iconica in 2018. It’s still very much a DAW-based library. Creating sample libraries is a massively expensive and time-consuming undertaking, and there are inevitably arbitrary practicalities.
I think this is a musicXML problem, rather than a Dorico one. Yes the Dorico export facility is incomplete, but most other program’s import capabilities have equal shortcomings.
simply creating aleatoric parts in the score and having greater control over them (in the graphic sense)
There's no expensive way to expand the instrument's range; it just needs programming. It's not about sound fidelity, it's about simple usability.
of course, but it changes the order in the hidden bar, and the hidden line allows it to be preserved
I'm thinking of a situation where a composer simply sits down and works, rather than constantly configuring and tinkering. I'd like to one day acquire a truly comprehensive music notation program, rather than constantly having to patch things up. Even if the cost is significant. An example of such a solution is Notion from Presonus. It has dedicated libraries that require absolutely no intervention after purchase and simply work once installed. Unfortunately, Notion has very limited notation capabilities.
I’m not sure what you mean, sorry?
I’m not convinced. I mean how would any program know I want an invisible barline if it isn’t in the xml? The tag exists in the xml standard, but because Dorico doesn’t implement hidden barlines it doesn’t get put in the xml. That sounds like a Dorico problem to me. (Every program I’ve used to import xml from Dorico accepts all the various barline types Dorico exports so, no it’s not really an xml problem).