Hello everybody, Daniel here. Thanks for the lively discussion about Dorico 5 since its release yesterday, and thanks to John for being on hand here to answer questions from the user community. I want to step in to provide a bit of additional context for what we’ve worked on in Dorico 5, and why.
Firstly, I think it’s important to state that our vision for Dorico has not changed. We set out to build the ultimate tool for music notation, in all its forms. The fact that we had both Engrave mode and Play mode in the very first version of the software released back in 2016 indicates that we have always considered those two aspects of the application to be of more or less equal importance. To articulate it more clearly, our vision is to make Dorico the best tool to produce any kind of printed sheet music (within the confines of CWMN, in practical terms from the late Renaissance to the present day), to make it a comfortable, creative and productive environment to compose in, and to make it capable of producing high-quality, expressive audio renditions of the music that is composed or copied into it.
Each version takes us towards that initial vision in larger or smaller steps. Dorico 5 definitely takes us closer to the second and third of those three elements of our vision than to the first, though I hope that the steps we have taken towards the first, while perhaps small, are nevertheless useful and beneficial.
Though I’m sure nobody is really interested in a history lesson, we devoted the majority of our development time in the first seven or so years of working on Dorico to areas other than playback – essentially, only Paul was working on the Dorico side of the playback system, with Ulf leading the small team of borrowed Cubase engineers on the audio engine side. The piano roll editor that was in Dorico from version 1.0 until 3.5 started life as a proof of concept knocked up in a couple of weeks in 2015 and then heroically maintained by Paul over the coming years. The rest of the team was working on the application infrastructure, the user interface, the note input and editing code, the hundreds of engraving processors, major unique features like condensing, and so on.
In order to take bigger strides towards our goal of making Dorico capable of producing high-quality, expressive audio renditions, we needed to completely re-engineer the piano roll editor, and in particular, once we had come up with a satisfactory way to make orientating yourself between the music in notation and piano roll easier, we needed to bring it into Write mode, so that it can be fully integrated into the composition and editing process. This was a huge effort – one of our engineers worked on it throughout most of 2021, and then when he left the team at the end of the year, he handed the baton to another engineer, who then worked on it solidly for a further year, through the Dorico 4.0 release and all the way up through Dorico 4.3, which was released towards the end of last year. It’s hard to overstate what a massive effort it was to make the Key Editor in Dorico 4 as functional, powerful and well-integrated into the software as it now is – and to add some unique features along the way (like the histogram editor, and the ability to edit and sync data between multiple instruments simply and easily).
To put that effort into context, there are nominally seven engineers in the Dorico team. There were eight, but when András left us at the end of 2021, and it was judged that other teams in the company needed that extra pair of hands more than we did. And during Dorico 4 development, two of those seven engineers were working on Steinberg Licensing for the majority of the development period, so as to help deliver that vital new infrastructure not only to Dorico users but to all Steinberg customers – a high price to pay in terms of Dorico feature work, but we were pleased to put our shoulders to the wheel to make sure Steinberg Licensing is successful.
So to have 20% of our available engineering resources devoted to a single feature area for a year is really a very significant effort – and because the members of our team are individual, talented humans with complementary skills and expertise, they are not simply interchangeable cogs in a machine that can be swapped in and out at will. It doesn’t make sense to work on particular kinds of features if the developers best suited to those features are already allocated to another feature or another project. We’re all familiar with this idea: by working on one thing, we cannot also be working on something else at the same time.
And several members of the Dorico team have not been working directly on Dorico 5, either, instead turning their efforts towards another project that will not see the light of day for some time to come. We have to be able to take the difficult decision to invest in long-term projects at the expense of delivering more functionality today, and in the end we have to work with the people that we currently have on the team. It would be lovely to think that we could simply hire more engineers, but that’s not the reality we find ourselves in.
Looking at the strategic goals for Dorico 5 specifically, there has been a marked shift in the expectations of users of notation software over the past several years – a shift in which I think Dorico has played a significant role, but by no means the only one. People expect and want to be able to get better sounding playback out of their notation software, with less effort expended to get there. Real professional musicians working in the commercial/film/TV/games worlds need to be able to efficiently produce high-quality renders of their music in order to win pitches or even supplement live musicians in real productions. Even home-based composers and arrangers are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on high-end sample libaries and expect to be able to use them in their scoring software.
Our traditional competitors, Finale and Sibelius, are making no strides to meet this need – they are completely reliant on the heroic efforts of Arne Wallander to achieve it. This gives Dorico an opportunity to meet this growing need in the market, and to become the go-to software that allows you to efficiently write, compose and produce music in a notation-based environment. We want to meet this opportunity head-on, as we feel it’s absolutely in line with the original vision we have had and have been pursuing since the very beginning.
At the same time, we are also facing competitive pressure in the wider market from free solutions like MuseScore, which has a (much!) larger engineering team than Dorico, has an unbeatable price point, and can really be a strong “fast follower” in the market, seeing what its commercial rivals are doing and using its scale and level of investment to clone or even improve upon some of those things. While professional engravers might not look at MuseScore today and see a tool that interests them, that might not be the case in two or three years – and it is already the case for people who are interested in producing high-quality audio renders of their music, thanks to the very promising MuseSounds library that the Muse team are no doubt busily iterating on to improve its performance, sound quality, and interpetive capabilities.
This is the environment we’re operating in. A small, dedicated team with many more ideas than we have pairs of hands and brains to work on in any given period of time. A fiercely competitive market that has shifted dramatically in the past few years. A broad user base with hugely divergent use cases and demands.
Obviously we are well aware that Dorico 5.0 does not meet the needs of every group of users. It represents our best efforts to deliver a valuable set of features to address the current market needs as we perceive them, using the limited engineering resources available to us, and the very limited time (don’t forget that the last Dorico 4 update came out in March, just two months ago – we don’t have huge, separate teams working on different versions concurrently). We also have business objectives to meet: simply put, Dorico needs to make money for Steinberg, or we won’t be able to keep working on it indefinitely. Delivering update revenue, and even more importantly bringing in new customers who will hopefully stick with Dorico for the long term, is imperative.
I know it’s frustrating that one of the three main planks of our vision hasn’t taken significant steps forward in this release. I know, too, that these are all just words, and what you want to see is progress in the software itself. But I hope that this additional context at least provides you with some insight into our thought process, and into the constraints that we’re working under.
Making Dorico the ideal tool for engraving and publishing music remains absolutely as core to our vision today as it was when we joined Steinberg 11 years ago. We cannot make equal progress towards all aspects of our vision in every version. But no individual release is the end of the story. We are working as hard on Dorico today as ever, and you have my commitment that developing the engraving and graphical side of the software is as important to us as it has ever been.
In the meantime, while I do genuinely mean it when I say that if you don’t see $100 worth of value in this release, please don’t feel obliged to buy it – it really helps us if you do. It allows us to be sure that we can continue to pursue our vision, which includes everybody who is using Dorico today, and countless thousands more musicians who haven’t yet seen the light. We don’t take your support for granted, and we really do care about our users and your requirements.
Thanks for reading. I won’t be able to spend a huge amount of time in real-time looking at responses to this post, but I will definitely check in and read any feedback you take the time to share.
