Oh hey folks, *in my best Clopin from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame voice* here it is, the moment you’ve been waiting for: I’ve gotten Dorico running decently well in Linux. I’ve actually used it a bit on and off for the past several months, and while I’m not ready to delete my Windows partition just yet, I suppose I probably could if I really wanted to.
I’ve got a video and a small (read: not small at all) writeup. Unfortunately, I made the video without narrating it, and there are a few omissions , and it’s a bit older, so the writeup, verbose as it is, is going to be more correct and current. Writeup is below and video will be all the way at the bottom, so… here we go.
Firstly, I should mention these instructions should be sufficient for folks who are somewhat computer savvy but who may have little experience with Linux (though hopefully more than zero). I’ll put a TL;DR with just the highlights for those who are at home in Linux. You’d still want to read items 0 and 11, the prerequisites and caveats/issues.
These instructions are for Manjaro Linux, which is based on Arch. So they should work great on Arch, but I feel like I’ve run into problems on Ubuntu before. The process is nearly the same, and I think the program installs, but I’m pretty sure it crashes when you try to run it (at least that was the case a year ago). If you feel like trying it though, it should just be step 2 that needs adjusting (use “apt install” instead of “pacman -Sy”, assuming winetricks and playonlinux are in the official repos, which I can’t imagine they’re not).
- Prerequisites:
I really only use NotePerformer, and this tutorial is somehow insufficient to install all the proper files for Halion, but I’m not quite sure how, so if you want playback, you’ll need NotePerformer (we’ll still need to try to install Halion though even though it won’t work, because it has some necessary audio engine files… at least I think).
The other thing you’ll need is a spare license (grab a Dorico SE license or a Dorico Pro trial license). USB dongles don’t work yet with Wine (or, if they do, I don’t know how to make them work). I’m fairly certain it’s only as of Wine 6.0 that there’s been any work done on this front, and I don’t think it’s fully completed yet. I could certainly be wrong though, and if so and you’re able to figure out how to use a dongle, I’m all ears.
- Get your installation files.
I have had zero luck getting the Steinberg Download Assistant to run with Wine, so you’ll need to grab Dorico installation files here: Dorico 3.5 Updates and Downloads | Steinberg
You want the Application Installer and the Sounds Installer. Download those and extract the Halion zip file (that’s the Sounds Installer). Either keep these in your downloads folder or put them somewhere of your choosing (but for these instructions, I’ll assume they’re in Downloads).
- Install wine, winetricks and playonlinux.
In a terminal: sudo pacman -Sy wine winetricks playonlinux
(in ubuntu/debian/etc., you should enable the winehq repo and install the wine-development branch from there. Instructions per distro here: Download - WineHQ Wiki)
- Set up a wineprefix.
The easiest way if you’ve never done this before is through PlayOnLinux, so run that (on first running or at some point in this process, it may ask you to install wine_mono or something like that. I don’t think it matters what you say, because I’m pretty sure we won’t be using it, but I’ve always just said yes anyways). On the main screen, click Configure. From there, in the left panel, there should be a button that says “new.” Click that, and set up a new 64-bit wineprefix. Name it whatever you want; I always call mine Dorico. It will ask you what version of wine to use. If you’ve followed along exactly so far, there should only be one in the list, so just click next (actually, on my particular system, because of the dark theme, I don’t think the text is showing up correctly, and it looks like there are no versions of Wine installed. I think this is just how it appears though and not how it is, so if you see this, you likely should be able to just click next without a problem. If there is a problem though, you may not have installed Wine correctly, so give that another go and try again).
- Extract the individual installers from the main installer file.
In your wineprefix you just set up, run Dorico_3.5.12_Installer_win.exe. To do that, the easiest way is to again use PlayOnLinux. If you still have the Configure window opened, select your prefix from the left panel. In the main part of the window there are several tabs. Click Miscellaneous. Click “Run a .exe file in this virtual drive.” Navigate to wherever you downloaded the Dorico installer file (Dorico_3.5.12_Installer_win.exe) and run that. This will start “installing.” Just as the progress bar is nearly full, hit “Pause.” This .exe file is not actually an installer unto itself, but it contains several smaller individual installer files. For some reason, while Windows would just extract each of these installer files and then run them, Wine will only extract them; no running, so we need to run them manually. But to make matters trickier, it extracts them to a temp folder that is deleted nearly instantly, so what we’re doing here is pausing the operation just after all the important stuff has been extracted but before the folder can be deleted so that we can grab the individual installers in order to run them ourselves. I’ve never needed to try this operation more than once, but on the off-chance you mess it up, you can always just repeat this step and try it again.
So navigate to the temp folder. It should be here: /home/<your_user_name>/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/<your_wineprefix_name>/drive_c/users/<your_user_name>/Temp/RarSFX0/Dorico/
There should be a Dorico3.5.msi file and a “Additional Content” folder. Grab both of those and put them somewhere safe (after you’ve put them somewhere safe, you can close the installer window; we don’t need it anymore. You can also close PlayOnLinux’s Configure window too).
I’ve never run into any issues with the files not being all there, but just in case, Dorico3.5.msi should be 252,915,712 bytes, and Additional Content should be 352,468,329 bytes, with 11 files, 7 sub-folders.
- Install some libraries and the main Dorico program.
On the main PlayOnLinux window, click Install.
At the bottom of the new window, click “Install a non-listed program.”
Follow the prompts until you see a window that gives you the option to “Install a program in a new virtual drive” or “Edit or update an existing application.” Pick “Edit or update…”
There won’t be any programs listed, so click the checkbox for “Show virtual drives.”
You should see Dorico and default, with Dorico highlited. If so, click next.
There should be three options on the next page. The last one should say “Install some libraries.” Click that. Click next.
Click “64 bits windows installation,” then next.
Click the checkboxes for:
POL_Install_corefonts (these are your standard Windows fonts like Times New Roman, Arial, etc.)
POL_Install_FontSmoothRGB (this makes it so that items rendered with fonts can be displayed between pixels, a must when Dorico is, for instance, zoomed out. Without it, on zooming out, anything rendered with fonts, like noteheads and a whole host of other items would be horribly misaligned with items drawn natively by Dorico, like staff lines and stems and so forth. If you want to see what this looks like, check out the Youtube video at the bottom of this; I hadn’t figured this step out yet when I recorded),
and
POL_Install_vcrun2019 (this is the Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 redistributable. Dorico needs it to run).
Click next and those will install.
The next screen will ask you for a program installation file. Browse to your Dorico3.5.msi. This will run the normal Dorico installer. Go through this like normal. After the Windows installer is done, PlayOnLinux will ask you if you want to make a shortcut. Click yes and find the Dorico3.5 in the list. Click that and then next. Name it whatever you want (I suggest Dorico 3.5 Pro or something to that effect). This will make shortcuts both in the PlayOnLinux Menu and on your Desktop. I usually delete the desktop ones, at least after this whole process is finished. After you’ve made that shortcut, tell it you don’t have any more shortcuts to make and finish clicking through the prompts.
- Install .NET Framework 4.8
In a terminal: WINEPREFIX=/home/<your_user_name>/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/<your_wineprefix_name>/ winetricks -f dotnet48
This will install the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8. Normally, Wine has mono (I mentioned this near the top), which is supposed to make this unnecessary, but it doesn’t work for Dorico, so we have to install this.
The -f flag will tell winetricks to force the installation, because it thinks that dotnet48 is broken in the current version of Wine. That may be true, but it installs and we need it, so we’re gonna go with it. During the installation, you may get error messages from time to time. Just click ok or whatever to move on. These are unimportant.
Also, during this installation, winetricks will install both .NET 4.0 and 4.8 as the former is a prerequisite for the latter, at least that’s true in Wine. You’ll need to agree to Microsoft’s terms and click through these installers like any other.
- Install the eLicenser Control Center
In PlayOnLinux, install eLCC in the same wineprefix as Dorico (follow the same procedure you used to install Dorico). The file is in that “Additional Content” folder. Inside there it’s in the “Copy Protection Driver” folder. Should be the only file in there.
When you first install the eLCC, a soft licenser will not be created (which like I pointed out, we’ll need, since we can’t use a dongle).
Edit:
In a previous version of this post, I had concluded that this next step was unnecessary. Turns out I was mistaken. So…
Grab the eLicenser Control Installation Helper (specifically, the xp-vista version, available in this Steinberg help article: https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/206632670-Soft-eLicenser-virtual-license-container-is-missing).
In PlayOnLinux from the Configure screen, in the Miscellaneous tab, once again choose “Run a .exe file in this virtual drive.” Run the installation helper .exe file. It will tell you that a newer version is installed and that it won’t install; that’s ok, it’s done what we want. There should now be a soft licenser. If you want to check to make sure that worked, you can definitely take a second at this point to run the eLCC and make sure it’s peachy. You should see a soft licenser and you should be able to run maintenance tasks (though tell it not to run those at startup; I’ll talk more about this later).
In my previous version of the post, I said that merely reinstalling eLCC would do the trick. It will not. You need to use the installation helper (and it needs to be the xp-vista version; the other one doesn’t run).
- Install the rest
All in PlayOnLinux (same 64-bit wineprefix as before, and using the same procedure as before. I don’t know if each of these is necessary, but I figured the more I got installed, the better the program would run):
Install ASIO driver (Additional Content/Installer/Generic_Lower_Latency_ASIO_Driver_64bit.msi)
Install Library Manager (Additional Content/Installer/LibraryManager.msi)
Install HalionSonicSE.msi (we unzipped this early on in the process; just open the Halion folder that we unzipped and it should be right in there).
Install NotePerformer
- Activate license
Open the eLicenser Control Center. Tell it not to perform maintenance tasks at startup. Only run those if there’s a problem (because sometimes, when this window pops up at startup, it thinks there’s a problem when there’s not, and if you run them right away from here while it thinks there’s this imaginary problem, it won’t be able to fix it, so we’ll want to disable those and close that window and only ever run them after the program is up and running. This way, this imaginary problem will have time to sort itself out before you try to fix it).
Activate your license like normal.
- Run Dorico and configure some things
N.B. Sometimes when I’ve installed this all, Dorico will not run without the eLicenser also running. So be aware of that and start that first if you’ve got a problem.
When the Steinberg Hub pops up, go to Edit > Device Setup, then Device Control Panel. From here, uncheck the “Allow ASIO host application to take exclusive control…”. When you do that, you should see a Pulseaudio device pop up in the output port list. Yay, now you have sound. Click ok.
Still with the Hub open, go to Edit > Preferences and then Play. Set the default playback template to NotePerformer. Click apply then exit. Now you can use Dorico like normal. Mostly.
- Addendum. A few issues:
Like I mentioned, you may have to have the eLicense Control Center running for Dorico to work.
When opening a document with a playback template or VSTs other than NotePerformer, Dorico will yell at you that there’s missing files. Just close those notifications and any other windows (there’s a big reverb window that always pops up when I open saved projects… wonder what that’s about…). Then in the document, change the playback template to NotePerformer and you should be good to go (that’s in the Play menu with the Play tab active).
Speaking of NotePerformer, its VST window has graphical issues, so it’s very nearly unusable (Arne, if you’re reading this, wink wink). As long as you’re happy with the default assignments and everything, you’re good though.
Performance is not… uh, well, it’s not full speed. It’s definitely usable (and I’m on two 5-7 year old computers, one of which was really not that great even when it was new, and even that one is bearable), but it could definitely stand to be improved. Scrolling a large document makes me feel like I’m using Finale again… 
Uh… yeah… sooo… that’s it. Hit me up with any questions, and enjoy!
TL;DR for experts:
- Download Dorico Application Installer and Sound Installer from here: Dorico 3.5 Updates and Downloads | Steinberg
- Install wine, winetricks, and playonlinux.
- Create a 64-bit wineprefix. I do all these next few steps through #7 in PlayOnLinux (which will set the prefix to run in Windows 7 compatibility mode, so if you do it somewhere other than PlayOnLinux, make sure you do the same).
- Run Dorico_3.5.12_Installer_win.exe in that prefix.
- Pause the extraction just before it completes and grab the extracted files from this (or the appropriate) temporary directory: <the_path_to_your_wineprefix>/drive_c/users/<your_user_name>/Temp/RarSFX0/Dorico/ (you should have a Dorico 3.5.msi and an “Additional Content” folder.)
- In the same prefix, install corefonts, fontsmoothrgb, and vcrun2019. I’m not sure what the file names for these are if you’re not using PlayOnLinux.
- Install Dorico3.5.msi.
- Using winetricks (this one has to be done in winetricks), force an installation of dotnet48. So, in a terminal (adjust your wineprefix path as necessary): WINEPREFIX=/home/<your_user_name>/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/<your_wineprefix_name>/ winetricks -f dotnet48
- Install the eLicenser Control Center.
- Install the xp-vista version of the eLicenser Control Installation helper, available here: https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/206632670-Soft-eLicenser-virtual-license-container-is-missing (it will say it didn’t install, but don’t worry, it will still do what it needs to do, which is to create a soft licenser).
- Install the ASIO driver.
- Install the Library Manager.
- Install HalionSonicSE.msi.
- Install NotePerformer.
- Set maintenance tasks to not run at startup in eLCC.
- Activate a license (Dorico SE or a Pro trial).
- In Dorico, in the audio device control panel in device setup, tell Dorico it can’t take exclusive control of the sound device.
- Set NotePerformer as the default playback template.
- Enjoy!
P.S. Here’s the Youtube vid:
One or two things to note about the video:
First, I’m currently getting about equal performance on my much-less-powerful laptop than what I got in the video on my desktop, so don’t fret if the video looks not great; Wine has been updated a few times since then, so that’s possibly helped.
Secondly, while I do have all my files unzipped and extracted and ready to go, I do show how that’s done in the video, so fret not.
Third, I didn’t yet know about the subpixel font smoothing, so in the video when I install vcrun2019, I should also have installed fontsmoothrgb (and corefonts while it’s convenient).
Lastly, at the end of the video, you see me faffing about with audio. In my recent times installing this, that hasn’t been all that necessary. As long as you tell Dorico to not monopolize the sound card, it seems to just work.
Ok… I think that’s everything… probably not… but I’m going to bed now… Hit me up with questions, comments, etc.
Peace 