The majority of the regulars in this forum were previously using Sibelius or Finale before they settled on Dorico. So either they’ve all taken a retrograde step or maybe, just maybe, your professor is wrong.
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I’m getting far better results with Dorico than I was with Finale, and on top of that, my parts are ready in a fraction of the time.
I know my scores don’t require the most modern advanced “out there” type of notation, but they’re not neo-mozart.
Just to name one function from Dorico that I like FAR better than in Finale: the ability to make open time signatures MUCH more quickly and easily. It’s actually quite intuitive.
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I think this professor is getting far more press than is deserved.
Students should learn that professors, being human, have strengths (one hopes) and weak spots like everyone else.
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Beautiful, A+ 
Best thing I ever did was a to quit grad school and start teaching myself. School has it’s place, undergrad STEM can’t be replaced by self learning for example, there’s too much to cover in the depth needed, but today with the internet there’s little need for a teacher for specialized skills as the best ones are already on the internet.
I write tonal music, and except for real glissandos, Dorico (and Noteperformer 4) offers me everything I need. And the staff and programmers at the Dorico division of Steinberg are determined to make Dorico the best. They’re not resting on laurels; they are actively creating the future of notation software. Congratulations to a wonderful crew!
By the way, I read on the Sibelius forum that Avid is for sale. Sibelius users must be sh**ting a brick.
Mike
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I know that “professor” (she is not a professor BTW).
You could ask her – and yourself – to put the programs to a test and provide solutions for Feldman’s “Crippled Symmetry” or Boulez’s overlapping tuplets.
Another example: tuplets over bars… (yes, possible in the competitors, but waaaaaaaaay more cumbersome to accomplish)
IMO Dorico indeed provides ground-breaking new solutions for contemporary notation that haven’t been there yet (well, Score had them, but Dorico supports those feature with MIDI).
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Funny, just yesterday I intuitively suspected that! What an absurd and grossly uninformed statement for her to make.
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That’s not correct. The only problem is that there’s a long to do list. What Dorico can do (simple or complex), it tends to do well.
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Well, it should not be held against her that students call her “professor”. It is totally common to call every person in the education area “Professor”, in Vienna and as a matter of fact in all over Austria. That starts with the so-called AHS (the “Common Higher School” which some attend at the age of 14, 15) and certainly doesn’t stop at the university.
However, the argument about Dorico, as it stands here, is simply wrong, as we all know.
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and THIS is absolutely the finest example of why that “professor” is wrong.
I would never have switched to Dorico if it could not do (and better) what I was doing in Finale.
Dorico does almost everything I need with a very few tiny exceptions that I know are coming down the pipeline.
And Dorico does everything faster, simpler, and more efficiently.
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OK we’ve sufficiently destroyed this persons opinion, let’s take a different tack at it - is Dorico good for doing everything including simple things? For example; a Zibaldone (It. Heap of Things). This is a notebook of observations, snippets you find, little ideas, just whatever, a musical notebook. Good for Dorico? Not whether it can be done, but how well does Dorico work for this?
I can’t decide. For one thing it’ll end up with a zillion flows, and Dorico’s flows are just a ‘heap of things’. Imagine them in the hundreds, it’s too much to manage. Also, what about variable instrumentation? One is a piano, another a string quartet. Sure you could make it work but meh …
The alternative is maybe the last bastion of paper and pen(cil). Hard to beat a three ring binder and a pencil to jot these things down, and it’s more flexible than Dorico. One positive is that a case can be made for it because of the iPad, that has the same portability as paper.
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For me it wasn’t just what Dorico could do better. It was also the fact that Finale made me pull my hair out (among other things) to the point where I was cursing at my computer. My late wife said she couldn’t take it any more and demanded I switch. Thank God I did.
By the way, her death had nothing to do with software!
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Yep. Nuff said.
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the thing is, you’ll have as much trouble, if not more, using Finale to try and attempt this.
+1. This is exactly why I switched too. I will say that there are things you can do in Finale (and SCORE for that matter) that you still can’t do in D5. If, and that’s a big if, those things are important to you, then the “professor” may have a point. They aren’t important to me, and personally I haven’t worked with a composer that these issues were important to in probably over 10 years now. If these issues are important to you, here are a few features that I’d like to see available in D6:
Staff designer: Need a weird staff with custom lines and spacing? No problem in Finale.
Cutaway score: Again, pretty easy in Finale with staff styles, although brace and staff label positioning is a bit of a pain.
Staff labels / “group labels” in Finale: Really easy to change positioning or display of any sort of staff label on a system by system basis.
Hide key/time sigs: Display of either of these is totally customizable as needed.
Other random display stuff: Finale allows you to apply a Staff Style to customize the display of any of the following to whatever region you apply it to. Much of this can’t be customized in D5.
I wouldn’t be using D5 if I didn’t think it was the right software for me, but if you do a lot of non-CWN stuff, it’s certainly not as customizable as Finale. Lutosławski’s “Symphonic Variations” (1938) was written 85 years ago and still isn’t really possible in D5:
Check out the famous Karkoschka book “Notation in New Music.” (German 1966, English 1972) None of this is “new” anymore, but D5 can’t handle a lot of it. Some of the more graphical stuff I wouldn’t expect Dorico to ever be able to handle, but there’s lots here that Finale or SCORE could handle that D5 can’t.
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Hi @Pepinello,
Well, this discussion became way too long…
My personal opinion about your question is:
Let the professor has her own opinion about Dorico, but you should be more adventurous and give a try. There is a Trial Pro version, so, check it yourself.
Dorico advancing a lot with every single update. I wouldn’t underestimate it.
With some workarounds you can produce even a complex aleatoric score, or even modernist. 
Natively Dorico doesn’t support many things needed for scoring an aleatoric, or modernist music, but it gives almost unlimited space for workarounds, until the team is able to implement the things as native features.
Try to create/re-create something that is complex from your point of view, and if you face any difficulties come back to the forum and ask more specific questions, in order to receive a proper assistance.
Do not relay on someone’s words about Dorico, explore it yourself and if you have any specific questions, ask those who are experienced enough - the people here.
Best wishes,
Thurisaz
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Hmm… thanks for mentioning here… apologies if I’m taking this too off-topic
FWIW - this news might give them initial jitters, but I wouldn’t say the Sibelius app (and userbase) are on any sort of ‘shaky ground’ going forward. Potential new owners, will surely see Avid’s software offerings as arguably its strongest suite, across the post-production/film/audio industry. Areas it continues to dominate. Would make sense to devote resource to strengthen and shore-up these, against the competition. Other areas certainly, will receive heavy scrutiny (just been reading about their hardware ‘woes’ for example).
For those who missed the Avid announcement back in May, here’s a link:
Basically they missed predictions, the stock tanked, they said “hey, we’re for sale,” and the stock rebounded a bit.
Sorry, but this is simply unknowable at this point. After Avid let Daniel and co go, Sib development stalled for a long time. It’s quite active right now, but there wasn’t much happening for years. Finale’s development pace is even worse. MakeMusic went private in 2013. How many new features has Finale come out with in the last 10 years? Some articulation placement stuff, SMuFL fonts, and … ?
MM’s entire focus right now seems to be on MakeMusic Cloud (which used to be called SmartMusic.) This obviously was lucrative for them when teaching went remote in the COVID-era. I wouldn’t be surprised if the “Finale” branding doesn’t even exist in 5 years as they roll everything into MM Cloud. The whole paid notation software industry obviously has to have a strategy to deal with MuseScore too.
I’m sorta more intrigued by the Pro Tools element of an Avid sale. It’s been the recording studio standard for a long time now. I’m pretty sure only 1 studio I ever recorded in didn’t use it, and that was probably over 15 years ago now. I would assume most recording musicians are probably reasonably capable with at least 2 DAWs, Pro Tools and __________. You just can’t avoid it. An Avid sale, along with a change in development or strategy, could be an opening for Cubase or another DAW to challenge the near universal adoption of Pro Tools as the recording standard.
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My prediction is for Avid to divest the hardware business, and keep the software subs rolling in.
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Dear @Thurisaz !
Thank you. But, you know, I am using Dorico since version 2. And I never thought of switching back to Sibelius since – even D2 was lightyears away from e.g. D5.
The points for me are different ones:
- I think what @FredGUnn wrote is correct: Dorico only good for simple things? - #35 by FredGUnn
But just 0.5% of all composers/engravers/editors need all this high end stuff. - Most university teachers for digital notation are working as engravers or editors in music publishing houses. Thats why they are teaching at a university and thats maybe also the reason why they use and teach Sib and/or Fin, just because the publisher is using this software for decades. So maybe the point is what @dan_kreider is writing: Dorico only good for simple things? - #2 by dan_kreider
I am teaching at the university, too, and I don’t get tired to praise Dorico for several things and force my students to try out the software. Ok, most of them are using Musescore. Students don’t have money …
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