Dorico in Cubase

MIDI 2.0 articulation profiles are certainly interesting (I was involved in the consultation process). It will be a bit of a chicken & egg situation, in that it requires plugins to adopt it in order to be useful.

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I agree, but I expect some vendors to be able to adopt it sooner than others. Specifically I think it’ll be easier for VSL to implement because they control the player and the samples, and also probably Orchestral Tools (SINE) and East West (Opus). Probably it will be harder for Kontakt-based libraries unfortunately because at the moment Kontakt itself has no knowledge of “articulations”.

Thank you for engaging in this dialog.

Dorico has per articulation delay, Cubase does not. Its not necessary to totally overhaul the cubase expression map system just to get negative delays in cubase. I understand that in years from now if and when the two teams consolidate expression maps it may be done a different way at that time, but we have a problem to solve right now. No not right now…years ago already…and this would be a very easy thing to add to cubase right now without having to wait for your teams to adopt dorico expression maps in their full glory into cubase…if that is even what you end up doing in the end…which is not completely clear right now.

Same with the editor. Perhaps some day it will be Dorico’s EM in cubase but in the meantime the editor completely sucks. you have to re-enter the same key switch multiple times often times because of the way its designed to edit things…and the common case of using groups ends up being hundreds of thousands of lines in the cubase editor that have to be entered and managed, I had to write a C program to actually do that generation for me simply because the current editor does not even fully understand the paradigm it is supporting or how people are using it or want to use it…but the editor makes it too hard so many people are simply not even using the EM to its full capability…and there are numerous other gripes about the EM editor. It can and should be fixed ASAP, I would view that is a fix to a problematic release from years ago that has never been addressed yet. If it ends up down the road completely overhauled to be like Dorico then great! But that is a long ways away and this problems have been terrible for cubase for a long time already.

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Daniel Spreadbury is the Product Manager for Dorico at Steinberg and very active and attentive on this forum. Also the principal creator of the SMuFL font specification.

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Hi @dspreadbury and the rest of the team,
That’s an amazing and long awaited improvement in Cubase.
The old Score Editor was heavily outdated.
I’m wondering something. Why the Right Panel in Dorico became a Left in Cubase and the Right one (in Dorico) became a Top (in Cubase)?!
I find this a very contra-intuitive and unpleasant. Personally I would prefer the Score Editor in Cubase to be an exact copy of Dorico’s Write Mode.
I hope this could be fixed!

Best regards,
Thurisaz

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That is so lovely of you, even though I don’t quite know if I deserve to be called a Smufl.

Yup, indeed!

Whenever a user says “this would be a very easy thing to add”, a developer fairy dies. Don’t kill developer fairies!

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The Score Editor is not Dorico. Our goal is to make it look and feel as much as possible like other editors in Cubase, so we are using the standard configuration of the tools used by other Cubase editors. There is nothing to “fix” here.

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just think how many composer fairies are dying from having to suffer through Cubase’s lousy Expression map editor and deal with articulation latencies? Goes both ways my friend.

That’s out of order.

Daniel is not saying they won’t do it. He’s just objecting to you saying it’s easy.

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Because users don’t have any knowledge about the codebase, development priorities, team resources, and their management, there is a longstanding courtesy on this forum that users don’t make ignorant assumptions about how ‘easy’ it would be to implement any given feature.

I’m pretty sure that both the Cubase and Dorico teams are not oblivious to the user requests on this; but that doesn’t mean they can just pull it out of a hat by Tuesday.

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I would say not necessarily ignorant (people who say this often have development backgrounds), but certainly not well-informed as to the details of Cubase’s architecture.

We’re very proud of the friendly and constructive tone that we collectively all cultivate here in the Dorico forum. Let’s keep that going :slight_smile:

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Even as a developer of 20+ years, you can never say with any confidence that a given task is going to be easy, even on your own code. You really do not know until you do it, and even then you regularly discover something unexpected that derails your original assumptions. On an old codebase with a mature feature, that is multiplied massively.

One of the biggest red flags is when someone says, “I’m a software developer and I think this will be easy”.

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“That’s easy for you to say”… :wink: :smile:

I agree with Daniel and certainly a team, responsible of product development, needs the maximum respect.

But, as developer and project director for (a lot of) years in a great international software company, I cannot accept that it’s impossible to make a valid forecast of time and cost of a software development. If this were true it would be impossible to make a competitive offer “bottom line price” or a serious investment with an assured return. Obviously this is possible with a great precision, but only after a detailed analysis and a deep knowledge of the application environment. Respecting delivery date and cost, is what makes proud a project director.

This said, it’s absolutely certain that none of us, end users, can afford a comment about how easy is to develop a new Dorico feature! :smiley:

MIDI loop format, it’s integrated into the MediaBay and all. I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it seems like it’s a MIDI file with information about whatever instrument plugin(s) they were built with (embedded vstPresets?).

I.E. In Cubase you can make a selection of instrument tracks and MIDI tracks can be included if they’re using one of the selected Instrument tracks. Export them as MIDI loop files. The instrument endpoint(s) are saved too. It makes it possible to browse them in the MediaBay and play them directly without loading them into a project.

While this method of transport might not hold much information about written notation, it’d be a step nicer than plain MIDI files, as the instruments/plugins could be preserved such that the exports/imports should ‘sound’ close to identical when first imported into one host or the other.

Not as complete and complex a saving a Cubase track. My understanding is it’s basically a SMF with some VSTpresets embedded somehow?

It’d be pretty neat to be able to make theme and variation tool-sets in Dorico that’d show up over in the Cubase Media Bay :slight_smile: Instant audition, and super easy to drag into projects for games/video/film/etc.

Daniel, Thank you for your reply!
I’m aware that the Score Editor isn’t Dorico at all. Still the Score Editor in Cubase always looked and felt different than the other editing tools in Cubase. So the exact replication of Dorico’s Write Mode would have been the best possible solution, especially for those of us who are using both apps.
No only the Score Editor in Cubase should look exactly as Dorico’s Write Mode, but it should have it’s own, separate key commands that following those in Dorico.
Does anyone involved in the creation of the new Score Editor asked himself/herself: “How those who are using both Dorico and Cubase are going to feel, when the Score Editor in Cubase looks like Dorico, but everything is placed differently?” Seems to me this question was out of any topic during the creative process.
Amazing and long awaited improvement, but not even half-baked…
Daniel, to have something that reminds for another thing but functions differently is far worst than having two different things that function differently. So, that means there is something to be “fixed” here.
We don’t need full featured Dorico as Score Editor in Cubase/Nuendo, but at least the Write Mode of Dorico.
Both Dorico and Cubase are complex enough apps, so additional workflow uncomfortabilities should be avoided.
“When it looks like a duck and it quack like a duck, then it’s a duck”

Best regards,
Thurisaz

On the contrary, this question was never far from our minds. But our decision was always to prioritise making the Score Editor feel like Cubase, and to avoid as far as possible introducing idioms that are native to Dorico if we could instead use existing idioms native to Cubase.

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