For us Finale users who are yet undecided, I have to say that Dorico has many things that are much more streamlined, easier to do, and actually make more sense. I loved Finale having used it for 30 years, but now having purchased, and using Dorico for 1 week or so, I can see that Finale (bless it) was getting old.
Just as a few examples:
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I write orchestral/chamber scores, and jazz stuff, so need to put in lot of cue notes. How Dorico handle this is an absolute dream. It places them perfectly, hides them in the score, puts the rests and stems of cues in correct positioning etc. I used to spend a long time preparing parts for cues in Finale to the point that I left some out as they were so time-consuming.
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percusison parts…need I say more! Percussion mapping in Finale was a pain. Dorico seems to be more intuitive so quicker to produce
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Chords and lyrics seem to have more control in Dorico in that the interface is easier
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There are popovers (think this is correct term) where you can highlight anywhere on score and start writing an expression/articulation etc and it will find it and put it there
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The fact that Dorico has different tabs i.e. set up/write/engrave/play/print makes each task so much easier without destroying what has been written
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Part creation in Finale was a little time consuming, especially to get the part layout looking good, ensuring no silly page turns etc. Dorico’s default works really well, and like evrything else in Dorico there seem to be fully customisable options. I know a lot of us in Finale used to wish that Finale would have something like perfect layout program, well this seems to be inherrant in Dorico.
There is so much more, too much to list here, but thought this may be useful if you are not sure. There are great videos and the support seems to be quick and good.
So relived to find this after the news that Finale had ended.
Also found that importing XML (from Finale latest version) into Dorico worked quite well. not too many edits at all, and I do have fairly large scores. thanks to those who explained we could convert an entire folders worth of files to xml!
As an afterword, I would say to watch the videos, start off with a piano score and build up from there. I tried to go to Dorico with a blank slate, i.e. no preconception with how it ‘should’ work. Just learning ‘how’ it works. This way I didn’t bring my ‘Finale head’ to it!
