Hello,
I bought Dorico 4 with an academic discount. I see that it now costs $99 to upgrade to Dorico 5, even though the price for first time buyers would be what I had originally paid for Dorico 4. (i.e., I would end up paying more for Dorico 5 overall with the upgrade, than someone who buys it first the first time now).
There is probably a logic behind this that I don’t fully understand. Maybe there was a free upgrade to 5 and I missed a grace period ?
But my real question is, if I do not upgrade now, what are the consequences. Would 4 be no longer supported at some point? Would it cost even higher of I upgrade later? I am not quite interested in the new features in 5 and will be happy enough with 4 for a while.
There’s no problem in not updating now. You will probably have an opportunity later to do it during a sale, and the Dorico 5 cycle is just starting, we know there will be interesting updates (there always are updates for everyone, meaning notation oriented and playback oriented features). And you can skip a cycle altogether — the upgrade price might be a little bit higher and you won’t benefit from some features during that non-upgrading time, that’s all.
Today’s first-time buyer of Dorico 5 has not had one year’s usage of Dorico 4. You could keep using Dorico 4 forever (see below) at no extra cost, or you can gain the new features that will come in the v5 cycle at any point in the year.
There is a grace period for anyone who bought Dorico 4 on 1 April or later.
** No software lasts forever. At some point, v4 won’t work with the latest OS version, on newer computers. Although there has recently been a very small bug fix released, the chances are that there won’t be any more updates for v4.
Larger upgrade ‘jumps’ do cost more than updating from the preceding version.
I would read through the Version History document, to see all the things that have been included. As Marc says, there will be “point” updates (5.1, 5.2… etc) for free (to v5 users) that will include more features and improvements.
I guess it is a hard reality to accept that technology will continue to advance and so will software. It is also essential as a business model to keep having meaningful upgrades as people who maintain these software do need to get paid, or the whole industry goes down
Anyways, the wiser thing seems to be to upgrade. The 2 month trial period is generous and so is the $99 upgrade price.
At some point in the cycle there is almost always a short period of time when the upgrade is discounted by about a third. Say (for example) the $99 upgrade price might be discounted to about $69 or so. At least that’s been the pattern so far. This is usually when I upgrade myself, just to save a bit, when the newest features are not particularly urgent. That’s when I’m going to upgrade from 4 to 5.
However, there was one point when I didn’t wait in this manner, and that was the upgrade from 2 to 3, because there were new features I desperately wanted, so didn’t wait.
Some of my family members have Disklaviers and such that still take these (what my friend used like to call “crunchy disks” because of the hard shell).
The US airforce used floppy floppy disks for the control systems of the nuclear weapons arsenal up until 2019 I believe. So relying on 4-5 generations old music software should not be the end of the world.
