Reading the original post has, perhaps rather perversely, made me think it really is time that I got going with Dorico, instead of just updating it & otherwise leaving it dormant. I have a commission for some art songs (songs with piano) with a loose deadline, so that’s probably where I can start. From all I’ve heard and read, I’m expecting to be able get on with Dorico once I take the plunge, despite my 25 years with Finale. It’s just taking that first jump…
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You are right, I use this forum since the very beginning and the tone changed dramatically after the users of the “Finale switch” arrived at this forum.
It might have to do with the fact that the arriving guests brought in their frustrations an disappointments from their prior environment, but I have another suspicion (that it might have to do with general political manners giving very bad examples to the world we live in).
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The forum and the manual never are…
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Your comment about setting a stop position is a game changer for me. I googled it to learn how it’s done and will try it out soon. Thank you!
True! But you can’t engage in a conversation with the manual in real time to get to the correct, very-much-NOT-wrong answer, something I’ve done numerous times with Gemini. You CAN engage in a conversation with this forum, and that’s great, but sometimes you can get to an answer even faster through AI, even if you have to go back and forth with it a bit.
Look, I realize people think what they think about AI. I’ll finish by humbly suggesting that the next time you’re puzzled about how something works in Dorico, try asking Gemini for help (in “thinking” mode, not fast mode). If the answer it gives is not right or not on point, don’t stop—answer it with “That’s wrong” or “that’s not what I’m asking.” See what happens!
Again, I’m grateful for this forum AND for the new AI tools we have.
PL
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I have a terrible time using the Dorico online Help and mostly use Google AI, this forum, and a PDF of the manual.
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Agreed-I do a general search online and it usually gets me to a specific post in this forum. The online help isn’t horrible, but that’s a low bar. The PDF is more helpful I think, but the Forum here is what really does it for me.
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FWIW, I think Steinberg should add a third point under “Help”, i.e. “Dorico Interactive”, where they offer a custom LLM, trained with only the respective manuals, hosted on a Steinberg server. That way, we knew we would be getting only verified answers, Steinberg could gradually improve the answers and they could neatly circumvent copyright issues.
The ability to chat with the manual could be a game changer indeed. At the moment, doing this yourself by external means constitutes a copyright violation, and running something like this locally hasn’t been very productive, at least for myself…
My 2c,
Benji
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Keep in mind that the more people use “AI”, the more costs go up worldwide for drinkable water and electricity, not to mention the damage to the environment due to increased electricity production through coal and gas. This is definitely not an environmentally friendly technology. Then there’s the damage to the job market, but that’s a whole other discussion.
I try to use LLMs as little as possible, and only when I can’t get an answer any other way. I also understand the first response is almost always wrong. Ditto for the second and third in a lot of cases. The counterintuitive part about this all is that you must know the subject and question well enough to recognize when the answer might be wrong. But if you’re at that level, finding the answer yourself should be easy.
I think AI is just about making us all lazier.
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LOVE that idea!
PL
Speaking only for my experience with Gemini, the first response is right at least 90% of the time, maybe more. Curious which chatbots you’ve tried.
PL
It depends. I asked Genimi if I should kill my neighbour who is very noisy, and the answer was ‘yes’.
I did not follow the advice. 
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Hahahaha! Go out on that limb. Follow that advice! What have you got to lose?
PL
Did you tell Gemini “That’s wrong” to see what the response was?
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This following statement is definitely charged since I’m not particularly enthused about LLMs, but I’m very convinced that ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. will lead and are leading to the average person losing the ability to research and critically think. Even in my own behavior, if I’ve chosen to click through and read Gemini’s answers in a Google search I can feel my brain shutting down and taking what the LLM says at face value despite knowing that they’re often wrong and that I need to do more research. Furthermore, AI-generated papers are flooding academia and law, with the LLMs’ output often making sources up completely.
I also just can’t get behind that LLMs illegally and unethically stole the entire internet’s creative works, and the creators of that work are just told to deal with it because that’s the only way the technology will get better.
(Crawls back into lurker hole)
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If you load the pdf manual into NotebookLM, that is essentially what you have. NotebookLM is essentially Gemini, constrained to find answers in it’s sources. You will get answers, with citations in the manual. By the way, you can add Dorico’s YouTube videos and other reliable sources to the same notebook.
One thing that Steinberg could do would be to publish a document that has forum questions along with answers that are marked as solutions. Adding that to NotebookLM could be pretty amazing, I think, although something would need to be done about the various Dorico versions, and which questions and answers apply to which versions.
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As an experiment after the discussion of AI-generated music, I aske MS Copilot to write a 4 measure Brass Quartet arrangement of ‘Jingle Bells’.
It told me that it couldn’t use the melody of Jingle Bells because of copyright (the tune itself is actually public domain). It said it could create a representative work and, based on middle C as C4, gave me pitches for each instrument in each of the 4 bars. This was the result. I used the Iconica/HSO playback template. Not a very impressive result from the AI-even with so small an ask. I only use AI when I need to generate an ‘original’ image for one of my score wrappers. I’m not a big fan of AI.
AI Bells.pdf (1.1 MB)
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When I ask AI to help with almost any DAW task I am amazed at how many mistakes it makes. This week after building a new DAW (which went pretty smoothly), I had an issue getting the Instruments Maschine Mikro to trigger VSTi programs successfully standalone. Both MS CoPilot and chatGPT were adamant that uninstalling the Bome USB utility was key and that NI never ever bundled that utility with any of their software, also saying that uninstalling it was 100% safe. Guess what. NI bundles Bome with Maschine and once I uninstalled it Maschine is absolutely non-functional. I got it reinstalled and figured out the problems on my own.
All during setting up the new machine I was bombarded with suggestions to install this program or uninstall that one. Good thing I ignored them. Everything is working great now. The annoying thing is that some of the suggestions are actually good. You just have to be very careful and discerning and ask yourself if you’ll be able to undo an ill-advised change.
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Honest answer - For me, learning Dorico was nowhere near as challenging as learning Finale, and after two years of using it full time I’m far more advanced in Dorico than I was in Finale. Yes, Dorico is very different - and yes I did have my WTH moments, as I’m sure all of us have. If you stick with it you might find, as I have, that Dorico can do things that Finale can’t touch. I wouldn’t go back at this point.
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Well said! Totally agree.
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