Subject: Dorico at 10: From Leading Software to Industry Infrastructure
Hi Daniel and the Dorico Team,
I’ve been using Dorico since version 1.0. Looking back over the last eight years, it’s clear that Dorico has won the “notation wars.” For professional publishers and high-end engravers, there is simply no alternative to Dorico’s semantic intelligence and architectural rigour. MuseScore and others serve different markets, but for the pillars of our industry—the great publishing houses—Dorico is now the sole standard.
With this leadership comes a new kind of responsibility. As a power user, I believe the next phase of Dorico’s evolution (the “Vision 2028”) should focus on Sovereignty and Automation:
1. Architectural Sovereignty (Linux & Native Formats)
High-end publishers need to know their archives are safe for the next 50+ years. I urge the team to document the native .dorico format to ensure long-term archival stability. Furthermore, a native Linux version(even a “Notation-only” build without the VST engine) would allow professionals to escape the overhead and instability of consumer OS environments.
2. Deep Scripting & Headless Workflows
To truly scale, Dorico needs to become “Infrastructure.” We need a robust API and a headless mode to integrate Dorico into automated, scripted pipelines—allowing for batch processing of entire libraries and server-side rendering without a GUI.
3. The AI Evolution (Kerning & Beyond)
While the current engine is excellent, the next frontier is an AI-assisted “Master’s Eye” for engraving. We need an engine that understands the aesthetic nuances of hand-engraved masterpieces to automate the final 2% of optical spacing (Kerning), making the Engrave Mode a place for exceptions rather than a daily necessity.
Dorico is no longer just a tool; it is the foundation of modern music publishing. Let’s make it as open, stable, and automated as possible.
I don’t think so. It should be, but isn’t. It will take decades before it is the only professional software left in use.
I guess MusicXML is this, in a way. No format will be “safe”. In 10 years’ time, so many defaults will have changed in Dorico, including redesigns of glyphs, etc., so any opening of a project and ‘automatic refresh’ will imply a complete review of a score. 98% will be in place, but it will not be “publisher perfect”. Only page-oriented programs like SCORE and Amadeus might be more stable, but even those will suffer in the long-run. If I open a 30+ year old score in Amadeus today, it will look the same, but it does not have the excellent progressive update that Dorico does. Enhancements/improvements will imply changes, hopefully small.
I agree with scripting. Most needed. But running Dorico as a server-side engraving system, I’m not sure I see the point. Amadeus can be set to do this. I used it a bit, but the output is only 90% correct. The remaining 10% will take 90% of the time anyhow to get ‘right’, unless you bezier-specify every slur, which will later be pointless if you change the casting-off. Notation for me is like plate-engraving, you do it once, and right, and then no more.
Batch processing with scripting etc. is another thing. That I totally agree on. This should be available when/if scripting is implemented in Dorico.
AI: I like the idea of training Dorico to what is “the right look”. It would certainly be magical for slurs etc. Many aspects of the current version of Dorico could benefit from AI.
These are bold claims. First of all, Sibelius has long maintained a very large share of the notation market. Companies that have been using Sib for a long time are still going to pay the sub, just to open old files, even if they start all new work in Dorico.
Secondly, the entire notation market is so small that no notation app can survive by specialising in a fraction. If Dorico was only for publishers, it would have to charge much, much more. Daniel has frequently said that Dorico cannot afford to exclude any segment of the userbase – it must be for jazz, pop, film scoring, early music, education, academia, ‘contemporary’ composers and anyone else.
And of course, we live in an age where anyone can compete with “the great publishing houses” by creating beautifully engraved scores and selling them on a website. To that extent, everyone who uses Dorico is a publisher, I suppose.
The demise of Finale has obviously knocked one horse out of the race; and if someone were to ask me what software I would recommend they should use, I would say “Dorico or MuseScore”. There are plenty of ‘also rans’ – Lilypond still has a certain cachet with academics who also use LaTeX. People still use SCORE and other abandonware; Encore still has its fans; CPDL still accepts native notation files from Cappella, Noteworthy Composer, Harmony Assistant, and others.
Yes, Dorico is far from finished, and there is still much to do. I look forward to every new release, which invariably has items on my wish list, as well as things I didn’t know I needed.
+1. I pay for it, but never use it (always Dorico). But good for opening old scores, converting to XML, and then … onwards in Dorico. (Amadeus cannot be converted directly to Dorico, but today I used PlayScore on an Amadeus score. Took 1 minute, then it was about 99% correct in Dorico.)
It took some time but my first priority with Dorico five years or so ago was to convert all my Sibelius scores to Dorico so I never had to seriously use it again. I kept Sib 7.1 on my system, largely to look at scores from others or test troubleshooting issues with libraries in Dorico but when I changed computers 18 months ago, Sibelius was not reinstalled.
well, exactly. If Dorico was only for publishers, I’d probably be using MuseScore as my main interest in producing a legible score with the minimum of input and then focus on the interesting side which is playback. Why not use a DAW? Very simple – notation is far easier to read and sometimes others want or need to see my scores too.
Might be a summer task… Since I started with Sib 3.5, I have always saved any published score as MusicXML as well, so I guess I could cut off Sib in this respect. But I have partners that work ‘faster’ in Sibelius (due to years of use) so I need it still.
, lieber „dein Name“