Experience & Feature Request (Dorico 1.2) from a Sibelius / Cubase User

Hi ,

Dorico is extremely well thought out. The basis is very much there and you can already do a lot. Here are some of my wishlist feature request for the next updates (mostly using Dorico in a Filmmusic / larger orchestral and big band score). I am sure most of them are known by the dev. team. Nevertheless, here are my observation for my personal needs and my order of priority. Most of them would be really necessary to use Dorico for me in a project with tight deadlines professionally:

(D1.2) No Coloured Key Ranges
(D1.2 ) Help - a Search Menu (Similar to Sib on Mac & PC)
(D1.2) Transform Plugin: Sharps as Flats / Flats as Sharps (( Workaround Filtertering sharps and flats and enharmonic transposing are still two steps))
(D1.2) Duplicate (Copy-Paste Part) Layouts missing
(D1.2) Harp Pedalling Missing
(D1.2) Focus on Staves ((Workaround - Create Custom Layouts from Full Score: Feature Request - More view options in Gallery View -))
(D1.2) Show Hide Text in Score / Parts
(D1.2) Arrangement Plugins Missing / Explode feature etc.
(D1.2) Optimise Staff Spacing (To Avoid Collisions even better automatically, although its doing a good job)
(D1.2) Multiple Players per Staff in Full Score Missing
(D1.2) Better Internal Sounds (wallender sounds integration ?)
(D1.2) Divisi Staff Missing: Divisi Strings on separate staves
(D1.2) Gallery View: No way to engrave (optimise staff spacing or drag staff etc.) in order to avoid collision between dynamics, playing styles etc…
(D1.2) Gallery View: Please give us the option to not display any multi rests when in gallery view.
(D1.2) Horn in F Bass Clef wrong transposition: Horn in F - Bass clef - Dorico does not know right transposition
(D1.2) View Bar numbers in Gallery View also over the Strings Section (very useful for large scores in arranging film music scores)
(D1.2) Show Bar number under Multi Rests
(D1.2) No batch processing for creating single Parts Title Pages
(D1.2) Dorico can not show the different players for different flows (Even though in my ensemble “Player One” can play Flute & Alto Flute, Dorico can not show in the individual part score that Flow 1 only uses Flute 1 (in the part name) and Flow 2 uses both instruments for the same player in the part name.
(D1.2) No Cubase Integration yet

Cheers, lokotus

For film scores, you might want to add huge time signatures to that list - and that is one thing that is expected to be coming to us in the foreseeable future.

About the integration with Cubase, nobody really knows what means, or put more accurately, there are about as many opinions on this as there are Dorico users. There’s a YUGE thread about this somewhere on the forum.

Arrangement Plugins Missing / Explode feature etc.

To take one example, one of the things I never understood about Sibelius was the large number of non-VST plugins. Why were the functions that these accomplished never made part of the program? I find plugins of that sort a big turn off and hope they do not become a feature of Dorico. :slight_smile:

David

The non-VST plug-ins are developed by people who don’t get paid to produce them. That means that it’s free labor for Sibelius/Avid and many of the plug-ins addressed issues that many users wanted fixed but that the developers either couldn’t or weren’t allowed to fix (development budgets have to be carefully distributed among new features, fixing existing bugs, adding requests that may or may not be wanted by large numbers of users). One bonus of such plug-ins is that users can find and download only those plug-ins they want without having that particular functionality adding to the bloat of the core program. And if the plug-ins don’t quite work as a user might wish, the development and support teams don’t have to worry about fixing them, saving more development money. A lot of those plug-ins address issues that only a small percentage of Sibelius users care about, thus making that functionality available to those who want it but not forcing it on the majority of users for whom it would be worthless.

I think plug-in technology like that is a good thing and I make use of many such plug-ins in Sibelius. But I can also understand if a development team doesn’t want to add the ability for users to write their own plug-ins because then the development team loses control of how well things work together. Unfortunately when something doesn’t work correctly, whether a 3rd-party plug-in or an essential part of the program, users contact the tech support team for the program, who have to spend time reminding the user that the plug-in isn’t their problem and the user needs to contact the plug-in developer. Plug-ins which don’t work well leave users thinking the program itself isn’t very good, so leaving that ability out can be a good thing from the publisher’s point of view.

But just because there’s no plug-in capability that doesn’t mean that users’ wishes which might have been possible with plug-ins will ever make it to the top of the development team’s list of things to work on. It just means that some of them will never be possible in a given program.

But they do, by the way. The team has been clear when communicating that the scripting features are incipient only due to a lack of time, because they were originally part of the roadmap for the first version, if I recall correctly what has been stated in the forums. They are also very aware that scripting is essencial to power users.

That’s correct. We really want to implement the scripting API in a future version see know that it makes it possible for the community to implement things that are suited to their own musical requirements. There are many features though that are of great general use, and in those cases we hope to implement them directly in the application, since that ensures that they feel like an integral part of the app (undoable, localised, documented).

Oh - an for filmscores with a lot of tempo changes - a (sib) feature like “Round Metronome Marks” - Very important, it gets confusing for the player to see Quarter = 127,00234 BPM…

There is an option on the Tempo page of Engraving Options for the maximum number of decimal places to which a metronome mark should be shown.

thanks, missed that one :slight_smile: