Hey,
since months I think about buying dorico – but still there are some things missing for me (e. g. Tabs for Guitar, Playback of Repetitions).
With the newest update I’m quiet happy and would give Dorico a (paid) try – but on the blog it says: "Dorico 1.2 is the last planned update for Dorico 1.x. "
So – will the next Version be 2.0 and I would have to pay again for an upgrade?
Best,
Steffen
+1 for the question.
From recent answers of the team after bug reports related to version 1.2, I would guess/hope that there will be at least one bugfix version before the next big jump.
Yes, I’m afraid you would. Dorico will follow a development plan similar to all other Steinberg’s products. Cubase might offer an adequate comparison on which to speculate: upgrading from Cubase Pro 9 to 9.5 costs 60€, or 160€ if you upgrade from 8.5.
The team has not disclosed anything about the “next version” or when. Daniel did caution that the rate of change would likely slow down as they have been working at a very high pace to get Dorico to it’s current release. That said, it has been indicated that the next feature release would be a paid upgrade. Steinberg has lately be going by “0.5” for it’s paid releases of other products like Cubase, so the next major release could be Dorico 1.5 This would also follow the pattern of other Steinberg products of 2-3 feature releases in a cycle followed by a .5 increment in the base number. As LSalgueiro pointed out Steinberg has been pretty reasonable when it comes to smaller jumps, around $60 US/60€ for a few big things and more like $119/119€ very significant upgrades to the product.
There usually is much point in putting it off, because the upgrade fee is usually higher for older versions than the most recent major revision. (Not really an issue with Dorico since the 1.x is the most recent revision.)
I do expect that there might be a bugfix version (no new features) sometime before the next major jump, but this is not guaranteed in Steinberg’s pricing scheme–sometimes you have to wait for a paid upgrade before a non-fatal annoyance is addressed. (You can review the Cubase world of releases to get a feel for this.)
I would watch the forum for Daniel’s comments on their development plans after they catch their breath. I know they sincerely want the maximum of satisfied customers at least when it comes to engraving issues. I would not expect any big fixes to playback issues like repetition, expression playback details (such as trills), or orchestral changes like complex divisi an a bug fix edition, or major new notations like Guitar tab. Daniel has usually put these as a medium term concerns, but they do have plan.
I understand that Tabulatur is something like a “feature” – but the correct interpretation of repeats is a basic fuction, every notation software should have – and to let people of the first version pay for it would be very disaoppointing. 
There are a lot of playback interpretation issues. I have been reliably informed such improvements are a matter of priorities.
(Underlining mine)
Agreed.
It’s almost as if it said “something something Notation” in the box, right?
In fairness to those with different expectations, Steinberg also said: “At the press of a button, Dorico produces playback and audio files so realistic you can hardly tell they’re not live recordings. And it’s the only professional scorewriter with sequencing built in.” (What Is Dorico: Discover All the Features | Steinberg) While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I’m not convinced that playback/sequencing/audio is their first priority and some might find it’s incompleteness in this area a deficiency.
It is definitely not their first priority. The experience of this past year suggests playback/sequencing/audio is the the stepchild to the natural-born child that is engraving.
If I had bought Dorico for engraving I would be most pleased with the first year of development. However, I did not. The long-anticipated 1.2 brought no progress in areas I would find helpful. I am a 14-month owner of Dorico now facing an upcoming paid update that I’m not sure even then will make Dorico useful for my purposes. I guess I’ll still have to rely on Notion, which itself has received almost zero development in the last two years. Overture has made perhaps the best attempt to fill the “notation with sequencer” niche, but I am hesitant to rely on a product that’s pretty much a one-man show.
To me it’s a head-scratcher why this area is not more of a priority, but the Dorico team is going the direction it deems best and most profitable, I’m sure. There are those who swear that Cubase’ Score module is up to the job. As Dave Mason said in his song, there is no good guy, there is no bad guy, we just disagree.
I think this poor development team is just too small to accomplish everything in the time we would like to see it happen. This is a blessing and a curse. It forces users to wait for features they would dearly love, but it introduces a modicum of quality control and attention to detail that larger teams often fail to provide. I do not doubt that playback is a large priority and I wouldn’t be surprised if the next major update (and the months of comparably stress-free development) include features in this area.
An earlier comment mentioned that engraving seemed first priority. This to me seems the correct corse. What good would an awesome rendition be if the score wasn’t worth printing or handing to musicians to actually play? There are umpteen programs that excel and indeed specialize in this very skill. Dorico needs to fix priority No.1 on the thing that it will be the best at: producing beautiful sheet music. That is, after all, why we are all using the program, even if it will one day have a host of other (not inconsequential) perks. It is Dorico’s raison d’être.
No doubt the aspirations of the development team are much larger than their capacity. Clearly they are a quality, forward-thinking team not content to just crank out poorly implemented features. This is the good news. The difficult news comes for me (and others like me, how many who knows) when 14 months after purchase I still do not regularly use Dorico, and face an upcoming paid upgrade that may not be able to change that. My only real purpose in covering this in the forum is to be a squeaky wheel that might get some grease for himself and others like him. I am realistic enough to expect that engraving users will continue to get the bulk of the features upgrades, but those like me must continue to push respectfully to keep our needs in the mix.
Re: “what good would an awesome rendition be if the score wasn’t worth printing or handing to musicians to actually play?”
I hope to use Dorico as a composition tool, composing in notation with quality auditioning and expression using virtual instruments (VSL). Once I have my composition and orchestration complete, then I would export it to Cubase for full-on virtual instrument production. I do not like DAW piano rolls as a means of composition. I do not expect Dorico to completely replace Cubase. Personally, I have no use for engraving other than to serve as a personal scoring reference. There are some for whom engraving is completely secondary. How many, I do not know, but I see their tracks here and on the Dorico Facebook page.
I think it all comes down to the way Dorico’s marketing was done from the very beginning.
They called it “The new Gold Standard” - without any addition like “only if you don’t need X,Y,Z” or “in 6 years” or “but first: some paid upgrades”.
People expected more, and the team does all it can to make Dorico what it was being advertised as from the very beginning.
I’m thinking of all those people who bought Dorico at version 1.0, when they knew that Dorico did not include all the features they needed. They wanted to show their support for the product and Daniel’s great team, and I really appreciate that.
But to find out that 1) those features you are missing will come years after you bought the product, and 2) you will have to pay again for updates in the mean time is a mood killer for them. I can understand that.
“those features you are missing will come years after you bought the productl”
Lumping all features you would like to see as taking years to implement is an exaggeration and certainly not a fact.
Robert, I dont see that line as exaggeration. It depends on what you need and when this will be implemented. Programming takes time, and the level of thoughtfulness that the team puts into each feature adds to it. That’s ok, please don’t get me wrong.
But we are more than 1 year away from the initial release, and it took until now that I can use Dorico at all because I depend on writing percussion. And nobody knows (and the team won’t tell us - for good reasons) the future timeline. Maybe it will be April 2018 when we get a great implementation of Figured Bass, then we could get a big update December 2018 that handles all sorts of contemporary notation. In July 2019 we might get a big rework that makes Dorico more usable, faster and fixes many smaller bugs - and those who are desperately waiting for MIDI editing or smarter/better VST library integration will still be waiting then. I’m just guessing here, of course, but I think you see my point.
There are too many big topics that all need their great solution. That’s all I’m saying.
Estigy, although the features you are looking for are different than mine, your last comment captures my concern.
For all I know it might be a year or two (or more!) before Dorico has the features that allow me to start using it instead of Notion. Someone might say, “Well then don’t buy the upgrades and wait until those features exist.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t save me one dime because in the Steinberg world upgrade costs are cumulative. There’s no point in skipping upgrades because you will pay for them in the future anyway.
So I not only pay up front for Dorico and it sits without being used, but I may pay again (and again?) all the while not being able to use it efficiently as the Notion replacement I envisioned, a capability that was advertised.
I certainly do not want to paint Daniel and his team as bad guys. I don’t believe they are, and that is not my purpose. But as a consumer and customer I must give them feedback in hopes of affecting their choices going forward. I hope I am doing so respectfully.
If those who feel like me sit silently while the potential situation I describe plays out, we are contributing to that situation, it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know that many dismiss complaints like mine with the objection that Dorico is after all only a first generation project that will take years to develop (a true statement of course), but they are doing so while actually using Dorico.
I am happy to support Dorico and it’s team with my business. I respect and admire them for the quality of work they have turned out. I would not want them to churn out poorly implemented features. If I had bought Dorico for engraving, I think I would be ecstatic. But I feel I must describe for them my situation, both for myself and any others who might feel similarly.
Well, we’re already more than a year in now. And given the high bar the development team sets for every feature, I would imagine some features that would be expected by those switching from the other two dominate players in the market will indeed be “years” since the first release. Development at the level the Dorico team has set for themselves given the amount of labor they have at their disposal does take many months. Unless Steinberg/Yamaha goes on a hiring spree, right now, it is easy to imagine that some features (deemed important by some, but not all) will be still be unavailable when we reach the two-year mark next October.
I personally believe that Dorico was oversold/hyped in its initial phase that led some to believe that Dorico was an immediate replacement for other products. For some, this has come true. For others, we will need to patiently wait and pay. I was hoping to do all my composing in Dorico (like DaddyO, I prefer to start with score in proper notation), but as of today, I use it primarily for final engraving and part distribution for players. It meets the engraving need pretty well (though some notations are incomplete) and has some excellent time-savers (the new cues functions come to mind.) It doesn’t meet what I want in a compositional tool (YMMV) and at this point, I have little expectation that it will meet those needs before 2019. While no one can predict the future, I don’t find that unreasonable based on the limited information we have been given. I would absolutely love to be proven wrong, but given where we are today it would be unreasonable to imagine Daniel and the team chained to their monitors for the next twelve months trying to recapture work that has taken others (including themselves in a previous incarnation) more than a few years.
Even if you insist it was originally overhyped there was a free trial. It didn’t cost to find that out.
Yes, there was a free trial.
There was also crossgrade offer that was originally for a much more limited time. That’s the reason I bought Dorico when I did. As things worked out the crossgrade offer was extended, but that wasn’t known at the time. I figured I had one shot to avoid Dorico being simply too expensive. I am still grateful for the chance to buy Dorico at a crossgrade price.
The judgment was made by me that there would be enough functionality in the initial free updates to allow me to use Dorico as I intended. And there certainly has been some functionality implemented, just not sufficient for my purposes. As it turns out my judgment was wrong, and it’s beginning to look like some of the functionality I needed is going to take longer than I hoped, perhaps much longer.
I don’t ask for or expect people who find Dorico already sufficiently usable for their purposes to think like I do. But it is disconcerting to sometimes encounter summary dismissals of the point of view espoused by myself and others, dismissals based on no real appreciation of my point of view. There was a free trial. But, as I explain above, there was more to it than that. You cannot look backward and simplify the situation. You have to view it as it appeared at the time of initial release.
In every post I try to add some qualifier to acknowledge that Daniel and team were having to make tough decisions with limited resources to throw at numerous and difficult development problems. They are good people doing good work. In no way do I think they set out to reach where we are in areas important to me. I cannot say more clearly, my only hope is to be a wheel that by squeaking a little bit more grease will come my way than would have otherwise.
I am also waiting for the day when I can move over to Dorico for my work. I understand that the comparison we all have in mind when we complain that the pace of adding features is glacial is with another program that has 20 years of development behind it; but I hope it will not take that long before all my needs are met! 
The biggest show stopper for me at present is probably the inflexibility of instrument names and instrument divisi.
With regard to the latter, a recent thread Divisi Strings on separate staves - Dorico - Steinberg Forums explains what is needed, and Daniel responded, honestly as always:
“That kind of divisi writing is going to be hard to achieve in Dorico at the moment. We have a solid plan for how to make divisi work as smoothly as other aspects of Dorico, but obviously it’s not yet in the software. I don’t think there’s a much better option at the moment than having multiple sets of players for each divisi combination and allowing Dorico to hide the empty staves, but I think you’ll find this quite a tough approach.”
David