As a Sibelius user I am currently evaluating, if it is worth to change to Dorico. In my work I need to use figured bass notation / symbols. Does anybody know, if this functionality is build in Dorico as well? I did not find any respective information in the feature list from Dorico.
I feel the Sibelius approach is not very comfortable and hope really to find a better solution for this.
Thanks very much for getting some advice.
Dorico does not yet include figured bass support, but we plan to add it in a future version.
Oh, that really is a big shame if Dorico doesn’t yet include figured bass - it cuts out setting around 200 years’ worth of music from c.1580-1780 so it’s a really major omission. There are loads of Sibelius users who work in the pre-1780s field, and not many of them are going to switch to Dorico if it doesn’t have figured bass. The biggest problem with Sibelius’s clunky figured bass was in part extraction, in which the extended horizontal lines (which were already fiddly to input into the main score) were not tied to the notes above them, so moved around every time the format of the line was changed - and if a part with figured bass was extracted, you had to create a new score (as what you then did to the figured bass horizontal lines in the extracted part messed up the horizontal lines in the full score) and re-set every horizontal line. It has to be possible to tie these to the notes above as this is what happens in Sibelius with hairpins… And whilst I am on it, please can we have a better font for figured bass than there was in Sibelius? A colleague (a very well known composer and Sibelius user) and I created a new figured bass font for Sibelius for two big printed volumes we created for a major publisher as what was provide by Sibelius was rather thin and weedy looking - especially in the ‘slashed’ figures.
Daniel, please do get onto figured bass soon - a lot of people can’t/won’t use Dorico until you do include figured bass…
Oh, that really is a big shame if Dorico doesn’t yet include figured bass - it cuts out setting around 200 years’ worth of music from c.1580-1780 so it’s a really major omission.
Chill out—as Daniel has said time and again, the team has been very forthright as to what would and wouldn’t be included in the initial Dorico release, and (more importantly) that they wouldn’t release a feature until it is really good. Figured bass is coming, and I’m certain that when it does arrive its implementation will be substantially superior to what we are used to from other programs.
Thanks for letting us know this. If figured bass is coming to Dorico, that’s great. Do you know when, by the way (you sound as if you have inside information). Many of us who use figured bass in Sibelius day in, day out (as both professional performers and as editors for major publishers) would love to know if this will be months or years away. If it’s months away, it might be worth getting Dorico at the “trade up” price now, and then probably not actually using it until there is the update including figured bass; but if it’s a year or more away, people will probably end up sticking with Sibelius, despite its slightly clunky figured bass systems (but which we all know and have conquered) as the current Dorico “full” price might well be beyond what many Sibelius users are prepared to pay. So any help in making this tricky call will be appreciated.
If figured bass is coming to Dorico, that’s great. Do you know when, by the way (you sound as if you have inside information).
No inside information on my part—I’ve just been paying attention since day one, both to Daniel’s blog and to the forum, and it’s clear from the way the team has been operating and communicating over the past four years that features will be implemented at an advanced level relating to ease of use and semantic understanding, and furthermore that no feature will be implemented until it can be done in such a way. Based on this approach, those who are paying attention can surmise that when figured bass hits Dorico, its implementation will absolutely blow away what we are used to, as the team has expressed that they don’t want the implementation of any feature to be anything less than brilliant.