I’m currently looking at a new scoring tool, I use MuseScore but getting annoyed by some playback issues I’m having so exploring other options.
I primarily score for jazz quartet/quintets and for big band, the latter being a 16 piece band. I also own Ableton Live (use it for electronic music) but have the NI Session Horns pro plugin for horn work on the big band which works nicely. However on Musescore I cannot sync midi well between the two apps without lags and drop outs and so on, so the only option is to export midi periodically and score using the horrific inbuilt sounds.
With Dorico Elements i’m aware there are only 24 parts which is more than enough, but only 12 playback tracks if I understand correctly.
My question is that is it possible to use the Mac’s IAC midi routing buses to have playback run through Ableton, and would I be able to have all 16 parts configured to seperate midi channels without hitting the 12 playback track limit?
I downloaded and installed the nightly beta build for it, but found it was still very buggy yet and actually the preferences screen where audio config was set was barely usable (auto snapped to the top left of the screen if you clicked in it, making it impossible to use tthe settings). May just be a broken build of course.
It was an honest enquiry. I’m no advocate for MuseScore - I’m just interested in their development path and others’ experiences.
AFAIK Dorico does not do MIDI sync with 3rd party software. (If I’m wrong, others will quite rightly chip in and correct me - and I fully admit my ignorance on this topic!)
Matthew, welcome to the forum. I’m not sure what you mean about a limit on playback tracks: you can play back just as many instruments as you have in your project.
There’s no MIDI timecode or other sync between Dorico and other applications, but you can use the TXL Timecode plug-in to achieve this:
@Janus if I can get the VSTs directly working in Musescore that’s obviously the simplest solution for me, as I’m familiar with it and there’d be no outlay!
@dspreadbury I’d be looking at the Dorico Essentials edition as the pro is probably a bit beyond my budget, my understanding was there are some limits on the parts and instruments that can be used with that edition?
Dorico Elements is limited to 24 players and has fewer included VST instruments (for one example, the Halion Symphonic Orchestra is included with Pro but not Elements) but should work fine for your 16-piece band. You can also use your own VST instruments in both Pro and Elements. Probably the main difference you would notice in Elements is the more limited “engrave mode” functionality — that is, you would have less flexibility concerning formatting.
As well, you could also review the practical differences by doing a month-long free trial of Dorico Pro, which can also be opened as Dorico Elements if you want to see the differences for yourself. (I am unclear which button to hold down during opening to make this happen but that info should be readily available on this forum with a little searching.)
From playing in the trial (though this is the pro trial), I’ve been able to route midi happily to Ableton Live using the IAC bus, with a single MIDI instrument configured in the VST Rack, and then just setting the midi channel on each part.
I’ll try opening it in the Elements mode to see.
So far, importing an existing Musescore created MusicXML file has worked fine and setting the audio up as I’d like is all good, just need to get used to the input style of Dorico.