OK that’s new, I switched to Nuendo at Cubase 10 and back then it only did 5.1, and yeah in 12 it goes higher. Kind of annoying, they keep taking differentiators with Nuendo and down porting them.
You mean, like, Dorico having pretty good DAW features nowadays? 
IMHO Dorico isn’t a good DAW - the mixing and feature set is bare minimum, but it’s the best rendering engine in the business and getting much better this cycle. And that’s a good thing.
Not least of which is that to get parity with Cubase it would have to add a lot of features. And it would likely become a mess. I spent three days with my son trying to figure out how to map a MIDI stomp pedal into Nuendo for him. It’s got three layers of indirection, very powerful, and PITA.
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I’m personally happy Dorico is not a DAW at all, and will keep DAW features at a bare minimum. I wouldn’t be happy if it got more DAW features. I would love if it continued to get a parallel set of playback features that may remember those of a DAW, but are conceived with a totally different goal in mind.
Paolo
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Precisely! I mean DAW’s are dinosaurs, they grew over decades to the present juggernauts we see today. But none of them were originally designed in a way that supports what they became, so it’s a bunch of layered addon’s I imagine with old, crufty architectures (there’s no way they can get around that!) Common with software by the way, nothing special here.
Dorico is a do over, interesting to find that it sounds like even the audio engine wasn’t a drop in, Daniel said they had a couple of Cubase engineers designing it for Dorico. But note that the three pillars of their architecture are Engraving, Usability and Playback - with no mention of DAW in there. Playback is only a part of what DAW’s do.
So personally I think Dorico is something new - an engraving program with a first class rendering engine. So far the mixing has been sufficient to produce excellent stereo bounces, but it’s main job is to produce first class print and MIDI, with minimal effort.
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What a great list! As a fellow jazz musician, yep, everything on here would be golden. But these would make a huge difference in my workflow.
My big three…
- Ties in 2nd endings, which has already been acknowledged above
- “Ignore vertical space” or whatever would fix tempo and rehearsal marks always fighting for space and requiring manual adjustment.
- Stackable chord symbols
I know these are on a lot of folks’ lists so I wont belabor them here. Just adding my voice to the chorus.
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DAWs these days are used for pretty much every genre.
Personally I’m hoping in a few years that Dorico and or NP will make using DAWs redundant for scored music.
But the truth is there is quite a bit of ambiguity in scores, particularly in how tempi and dynamics should be interpreted. At the moment we need conductors to do this. In a few years, AIs could come to our rescue here.
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Indeed. Just to mention that I read on the blog of a developer (might have been a Steinberg employee, I can’t remember now) who wrote that the UXUI of the original Steinberg sequencer was modelled on the tape recorder and a studio control room rather than anything to do with any score.
When MIDI and audio were being integrated into a single program several years later, the fluidity of tempo found in any human performance was sacrificed in favor of the rigid grid because recorded audio had the tempo baked in and there were no tools to “warp” audio back then.
IMO what’s happening with notation playback now is a piecemeal and selective replication of fossilized DAW features rather than any kind of rethinking of playback towards “performance” instead of “audio processing” angle. The fact that most notation programs seem to rely on the same rigid tempo track (even though they don’t feature audio tracks) is a good indicator. Maybe playback in notation software is destined for support function. But if any area is ripe for a real breakthrough, it’s this.
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Yes, which is why it would be so great to be able to record in the tempo with something like Tap Tempo (Finale, except something that doesn’t crash…). Lots of music needs to be freed from the tyranny of the click!!
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Yes! I love to play in the parts. It’s so much more expressive. But I’ve yet to find a good workflow of extracting the tempo of my recorded MIDI segment and applying it to the global tempo track. If Dorico could offer that (conductor track or however else it might be implemented), I’d be so happy. And the quality of my mockup will be exponentially better.
13 posts were split to a new topic: Difficulties with editing rhythms in Dorico
I never used Finale/Sibelius, being too horrified by how old and expensive they were. So mostly wrote by hand and used Lilypond when needed (loved that text interface, works for me being an engineer and coming from TeX).
Anyhow FWIW Dorico’s approach is eminently sensible to a person new to it as you care about the notes first and foremost, not bars. It would be very strange to have to think about bars that fit notes (and allowing arbitrary number of notes that have to be post correct is just obscene.)
I don’t know about that. Clearly Dorico has a MVC/Model View Controller approach down to it’s bones, which has a profound affect on this software, in that the tempo track you see means nothing. It’s just a View - a simple, convenient one that borrowed from the existing UI’s they had already developed. Assuming this is correct (and it has to be) then internally temporal data is just another data blob which the Controller combines with the other musical data to produce an output.
In other words, given enough time and need I think there’s zero reason you couldn’t have whatever performative tempo editor you want - with MVC Views are arbitrary and can be multidimensional. And given that usability and playback are two legs of the Dorico stool it’s not impossible that something will happen here, eventually.
What is needed is a new controller interface - something like a theramin that you could literally conduct and the tempo track would respond.
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A fader (in relative mode) could do… 
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Or get someone to write a plugin receiving data from a Leap motion controller, so you can actually conduct your score…
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I find it strange to think about notes and not feel rhythm while improvising or composing. Students used to bring me original pieces without bar lines because they found it difficult to notate the rhythm. As a result, they had no sense of the rhythm of their music and wrote in a crazy quilt of constantly changing meters.
And if someone is feeling the rhythm but just not knowing how to notate it, that will come with more experience.
I experience it as pitch and rhythm initially too, but fitting it into bars is usually an intellectual exercise for me, and takes some wrangling to get it just right sometimes. Not unlike fitting words into coherent sentence structure. But to me it makes natural sense that bars are fixed and can only fit so much, so as you shove notes in they’ll spill around as they need to.
The Finale way apparently is you can shove notes in and figureout later whether it’s legal musically. That mindset is a typesetter literal approach where you can line punches up as you wish.
I guess the basic idea is Dorico doesn’t let you write illegal music 
I’m not sure exactly why, but I usually have different results actually playing something versus tapping (aka conducting) it. The latter is almost always less convincing and less “real” in expressiveness.
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Yeah, if they do a humanization on time (mild rubato) which seems more than likely, I’ll be happy. Conducting against a machine just feels too artificial.