I bought it as soon as it was announced (in a Dorico video, in July), at which time I could only order it from Amazon UK.
It’s a good start (it educated me for the first time about Lock To Duration, a brilliant feature that has saved my sanity) but one book can do only so much. The official manual has all the info in it somewhere (or will when it’s updated to the current version), but it really isn’t designed for browsing, to learn what else Dorico has that I might enjoy adding to my repertoire.
What I really hope for is a book filled with sample projects (a step more complex than the two in the Jones book), talking me step by step through the process (even perhaps educating me about such basics as optimum workflow habits, even down to hand placement). I know I say this tiresomely often here, but Daniel Spreadbury’s own detailed tutorial on the setting up of a choral multimovement service taught me an enormous amount about the workings of a program I’d already known for months. I wish there were dozens more like it, and this is something a book could provide.
There may be days it will bite you, and areas in which it is still maturing. But for me it is still very much worth it. My path was Finale, Musescore, Sibelius, Dorico (with a little bit of back and forth) and I feel like I’ve very much found “home”.
What a nice bunch of guys! This comment about a refreshed approached from the original Sib team is interesting.
Yes I shall certainly give the trial a go - and look at those YT tuts that were mentioned.
Somebody asked my typical Sib usage, and frustrations:
I work almost every day on Cubase, and only relatively occasionally have to create an actual score, which varies from full orch, to SATB plus organ, I did some string ensembles recently etc… etc… the very occasional classical guitar style part and the occasional big band arrangement - all basic stuff - all notated by hand (because I have never successfully figured an EASY way to import a midi sequence from Cubase into score form.)
I find the Sib GUI clunky - but I am aware that’s also because I’m not an 8hr a day user.
I can agree to what all the others said. I started at about 1992 with Score. Then I saw Sibelius version on the Music fare in Frankfurt - there it was running on Acorn PCs - and I was impressed by its performance. Neither Capella nor Finale impressed me at that time. As soon as the first version was available on Windows I bought it and used it until version 7.
Then the development team in London was fired and the code was passed to a team in Ukrain. And of course they had a very high learning curve to get to know the code base. Therefore new features and bug fixes came slowly. (I do not blame the new development group).
When Dorico was announced I immediately jumped on the train. But not because of the huge number of features that were not available in the first version, but - as a software developer myself - because I saw the unique potential for the group in London. They had the opportunity to develop from scratch a new system and avoid all the mistakes that they did in the first run within Sibelius.
It is very seldom in the software industry that such a huge product gets the chance to do a complete restart.
And the progress of the team is great. (Even that I fear that there will be a slow down soon because of the upcoming change from Qt5 to Qt6 and transition to the new Mac HW.)
