I don’t understand the reactions to valid critiques and observations about Dorico. Some people get very defensive, when in reality these programs are commodities for which we pay dearly, and we should expect the highest standards for what we are paying for.
If you are expecting a program with all the bells and whistles, then go to Sibelius or Finale. They have have decades of refinement and improvement. I started with Sibelius 2 and I couldn’t do half the stuff I could now do in 7 or 8.
This forum is way to easy to criticise. The Dorico team have been nothing but open and honest about their realistic expectations from v1.0. The subsequent versions will improve everything else, I just don’t think they deserve the flak that keyboard bashers are giving…
Just as an exercise, count the number of Steinberg staff hopping on and off this forum to help!
Yes, and it’s pushing 11pm here!
Yes and no. When something is advertised as the new “gold standard” and “advanced notation software” people rightly expect a certain level of functionality. Outright negativity? No, but it’s also wrong to suppress those who dissent. It’s on the back of desire that the envelope is pushed.
I’m pro-Dorico and learning more everyday. I am learning it’s ways. I don’t love it yet. I hope to. I appreciate your sentiment, however, because we all want this thing to soar!
And it will.
Exactly! I purchased Dorico in the full knowledge that it wouldn’t have “all the bells and whistles” of its mature competitors. I watched the videos, followed the blogs and knew that it had been through a Beta testing phase, so I expected, at least, basic functionality … probably with a few glitches here and there - it’s new software, that’s only to be expected.
What I didn’t expect, especially given the premium price, was that it’s still, well and truly, in a Beta phase. It’s been pushed out of the door far too soon. Even trying to do basic things like importing music xml files leaves Dorico hanging requiring a Force Quit. It seems to be unstable and capricious in the way it handles even the most basic tasks. In its current state, for me, it’s unusable. That’s not what I paid for. I didn’t pay for promises of things to come, I paid for basic functionality now. That’s not what I got. And I object to paying a premium price for the “privilege” of being little more than a Beta tester.
That’s not to say that I don’t think Dorico shows great potential and promise - the team have done a remarkable job to even get it this far. But potential and promise is not what I paid for - I paid for basic functionality now, which is not what I got. I got an overpriced product (given its current functionality) that is still basically in Beta.
Would I recommend Dorico? I’d certainly recommend keeping an eye on it to see whether the potential and promise eventually come to fruition. But, in its current state, no - it’s not ready for a professional environment yet.
I wouldn’t say I’m disappointed - I can see a program going about things the right way, a program that clearly has huge potential - but, after 48 hours of trying hard to come to grips wth it, I find myself compromising too much with regard to its limitations, so it’s time for me to put it back on the shelf and keep a close eye on its future developments.
My only real beef is the lack of a detailed manual. The vast majority of my time with Dorico has been spent reading what there is by way of a manual, scouring this site for clues as to how to achieve what I wanted, and when that hasn’t worked, pretty much opening up every possible menu in the program in the hope that I might find what I’m looking for there. Occasionally that worked but for the most part it didn’t. For what it’s worth, my own learning experience would have been far less time-consuming and frustrating with a comprehensive manual.
I see Dorico as an investment, one that will come good. In the meantime, I’m heading back to my old, trusty, if rather knackered, warhorse.
Given the otherwise totally silence of Steinberg staff this indeed says something…
About: manually adjust staves …
Why would one want to adjust the distance between staves or to move staves around with the mouse?
Maybe in a setup like this: You have 6 players, on a normal page two systems fit. On the first page, because of the title, Dorico can’t place a second system, if it applies its strict rules for vertical spacing, so it puts it on a new page, which ist basically very o.k. But, if you could … pack it a little bit more together, 2 sytems would fit.
Happend to me yesterday, an the workauround was to enlarge the frame, via the page border setup…, so I had to adjust the frames in the other frame templates, complicated, inexact and no good idea at all.
So one thinks, in Sibelius, one simply would drag the staves around, or use a “fit in page” macro, and if it looks ugly, Ctrl-Z.
But I think, this would not be the Dorico way to do things.
For me it would be more within the concept, if I could tell Dorico something like this:
“In this specific music frame, please be a little bit sloppy with the rules of vertical alignment”. That would mean to have a switch in the properties panel of the individual music frame, or even better three values to be adjusted manually: allow “sloppyness” for system-system skip, for the skip between groups, for then skip beween the staves. Maybe then I could set a value of the amount of “sloppyness”. With this Dorico could reduce the vertical distances up to a certain percentage, and look if it can put more sytems into this frame. It should of course not allow a “sloppyness” that would lead to overlapping staves.
In the world of typesetting, as a parallel, in the TeX/LaTeX Program, from which the idea of the sloppyness stems, there are not only skips (a defined space of … pt), but also more flexible skips (called “glue”), like x pt plus y pt minus z pt: “Use a skip of x pt, but if you need to shrink a bit, you may reduce the skip by up to z pt, and if there is space left, you may enlarge it by up to y pt.”
If the skip between systems, groups and staves would be defined in this way, Dorico would have more flexibility by default to put systems into frames. … But I fear, this would not fit into the given data model…
In any case, moving staves with the mouse should be protected against accidentally grabbing a stave an moving it somewhere (like what happens to me in Sibelius very often, resulting in horrible overlaps).
AHA! Now I get it. Thanks, Anthony. I am starting my own list of “How to…”