Finished big Dorico project, a few things I've noticed...

Generally really enjoying the workflow in Dorico, and thrilled with how the finished score looks, but I’ve found a few things along the way that I think need addressing:

  1. When exporting flows to a separate file, or exporting MIDI files, if you’re flow has a slash in the name it won’t work. Took a while to figure out what was going wrong there.

  2. Would desperately like to be able to turn off MIDI Thru so that when inputting notation or just using midi keyboard to test an idea I can be easily in control of the sound. I’d be so happy if the Dorico instruments only made noise during playback. Also, I have a control surface attached to my system, and any fader moves/button presses result in notes passing through Dorico.

  3. Typing in lyrics is way too laggy. I love the lyric interface, and I love the way Dorico understands ties. But especially the longer my project became, the worse the lyric input got.

  4. Adding new flows and changing voices became slower and slower. I’ve been transcribing a musical for piano and vocals. Only have 4 vocal parts and one piano, but there are around 35 cues, each in their own flow, and as the project grew, adding or removing a voice from a flow, or reordering the flows was taking up to a minute.

  5. Inputting music in Dorico is (mostly) a delightful experience, but I really miss being able to add notes to chords by interval at the press of a single shortcut. This is especially useful for adding octaves to piano lines easily. The functionality is all there, I’d just like to be able to assign shortcuts to particular intervals.

  6. Sometimes, engrave changes I’d made to a particular flow (especially staff spacing changes) seemed to be forgotten after a while. I’m not sure why, but this definitely happened every now and then.

A slash in a file name is not a legal character anyway - it’s used as a separator between the levels in a directory (folder). So (1) isn’t really a bug in Dorico. If you have been using it without any problems in other software, you have been lucky so far!

We’ve fixed that for the next update.

  1. Try creating a new layout with just the flow you’re working on and switch to that. That should make editing a bit faster.

  2. I think we have this in the next update

  1. Layout of Big Band Score Sections | Discover Dorico with John Barron - YouTube
    26:40