I recently demoed Dorico 2, as I’ve been using Cubase in conjunction with Sibelius for a number of years. I would gladly switch to the far superior Dorico 2 if it would incorporate the ability to import audio. By “importing audio” I don’t mean anything elaborate, just a single track of audio per project, for the CRUCIAL purpose of working from a reference/source track. This is how I currently work in Cubase as an orchestrator, where I work most often from a client’s stereo file rough mix to create the desired orchestration.
I am not approaching this from a film scoring perspective, where I suspect a rather inelegant workaround is possible through importing a video file with the music one needs as reference married to the video, and then deleting the separated video file once it is Dorico. My concern (and I would assume other users as well), is a purely audio/music based issue, though I’d assume film scoring users would benefit from this added streamlined functionality request. Thank you very much… and if and when this is implemented I’m ready to hit “Add to cart”.
I’m not sure I understand you correctly with the video workaround thing. What I’ve done in the past if I needed music to accompany the score for easy transcribing was to open the audio file in QuickTime Player and re-save it as video. I did have to convert it to some video format that Dorico supports but that was fairly easy with some random online tool.
Of course, importing pure audio would be nice, and Daniel has mentioned that eventually they plan on doing something in this regard, but the audio-as-video workaround isn’t that inelegant in my opinion and I don’t see a big difference in how importing audio would work.
Just create a blank video file with your audio track in an editing program (personally i use Sony Vegas) and import that as video into Dorico, this is what I also used to do in Sibelius for orchestration work. It’s the most obvious solution for now until the development team come up with something better.
We certainly don’t rule out playing back simple audio tracks along with the music in a future version, but using a video file with a still image simply in order to get the audio through will work reasonably well for the time being, I think.
Agreed. Not as elegant as directly importing the audio (which I’d also love to be able to do for simplicity sake), but easily overcome by attaching the audio temporarily to a static video image and then importing that instead, which I’ve been doing regularly.
The good news is that videos with static images tend to have very small file sizes too, since there is really very little info to encode. Many formats simply wait for pixel change info (if I’m not mistaken) and if the pixels don’t change, there’s no bulk to the file.