I’m impressed with Dorico Dev…integration of old tech/ideas with the new. When it comes to UI, there are some things I’d personally do differently with Dorico, but for the most part it’s quite solid and very usable.
Dropping the Dongle alone is HUGE. A significant investment in resources to make it happen (and still isn’t totally complete). Ditching SE variants of Sonic wasn’t trivial either (and still presents a few issues to iron out).
When it comes to HALion and GA (To a lesser degree than HALion), they’re among my favorite UIs precisely because they are POWER USER UIs. Not all watered down. The user can ‘customize’ it for a wide variety of needs and workflows.
In Cubase/Nuendo, the insert plugins included with Dorico are second to none in terms abilities like remote control, parameter automation, side chaining, and more. Again, Dorico will gradually get all those bells and whistles as well (That ‘arcane looking stuff’ is bleeding edge, state of the art under the hood…it’s next generation VST3 and beyond…ya won’t need ‘CCs’ to automate them, but instead will be able to track it on lanes with much higher precision/resolution than MIDI CC events).
Dorico is the only major scoring package solidly in the world of 64bit floating precision dynamics, as are the included suite of effect and instrument plugins. It sounds GREAT.
So…when GA and HALion as we know it first came out they barely fit on the screen (pretty dern large really). On my laptops I’d have to move the plugins around to get at things they were so BIG. The huge screens and/or smaller ones with uber high resolution are relatively new, and not particularly necessary when designing a good music work station. Some of the larger resolutions are still cutting edge for even the latest OSes, have buggy drivers, competing standards, and more.
A system designer would take these things into account when setting up a system, and opt for monitors that work well and can be seen from across the console. Many exist that it’s no problem to see GA from 6 to 8 feet away, and you can hook up 4 to 6 of them for similar cost to one of the latest and greatest.
Even with newer screens, if one READS THE MANUALS, they quite often come with scaling software and more, to nip issues like this in the bud (sometimes they don’t work all that well…but it CAN and should be argued that they are the ones that ‘broke the standards’ and neglected to provide proper legacy support [funny that software that just came out last month needs ‘legacy support’ for some ‘very expensive’ screens and graphic cards…maybe even up to 95% of all existing software ‘looks too small’ on the stuff).
They’ll get around to implementing a more scalable GUI in time. Problem is, they’re still dealing with figuring out how to support 64 CPU cores instead of 2 or 4! They’re still dealing with ‘canning VST2 in favor of VST3’. Still dealing with supporting Apple Silicon. Still trying to fix the broken multi-platform support for the ‘Apple Quicktime’ (took Steinberg at least two Cubendo versions to come close to replacing how well it worked back when Video was handled by QT). Replacing the ‘legacy remote’ systems in Cubase isn’t trivial either, but it’s being done…while keeping some of the old code going until it ‘can be fully replaced’.
Topping it off, MIDI 2.0 is on the horizon. So are things like MPE, Note Expression, and more.
Pressure is there to ‘support it all’, but they only have so many people, and so much time before the next release is due. For a while, most people will still be using ‘old gear’, so they can’t just ‘strip that out’ and get ‘on with the new’.
That’s not enough! People want mobile versions too! So resources are shoveled off to try to get versions of Dorico, and Cubasis working for iOS, Android, etc.
Then people complain if it doesn’t port instantly! If the $200 tablet doesn’t perform like the $2,000 Mac Pro! Etc…
The companies are relatively small, as are sales compared to other kinds of software. Users demand so much with every release and never run out of complaints.
MPC workflow is quite good. Really, it is. No, they didn’t just sit down and solder random old parts and figure out how to use it later. Outfits like Grass Valley, Pennical, Apex, Yamaha, Mackie, and a whole lot more got very ’ involved’ with production workflows. They studied the demands of guys doing live video broadcasts. Watched people switch news casts, and mix live concerts. Spoke with engineers in post-production environments doing film scores with thousands of tracks (both audio from real acoustic instruments/singers and virtual instruments). And more…
You can do a ton of stuff with GA it in REAL TIME, while the transport is going, that you simply cannot do with any other workflow. In a tracking DAW, you can even ‘sample these pads’ in real time off to the side (monitoring on headphones or speakers off the main mix), and USE them in a live setting seconds later. Compose ‘near instantly’, on the fly, and never have to STOP your transport (kinda like silent picture days…a guy sitting in front of a moving picture could ‘build’ the sound track in real time improvisationally, while monitoring the audience. He had tools tacked onto the ‘organ’ that could get all sorts of sounds called up INSTANTLY at his fingertips. In MPC world, not only can you call them up easily, you can ‘build them’ in real time as well.)
With a little reading and practice, it’s not unlike having banks of organ stops at your fingertips. You can do ALOT with just a few pokes and prods. It’s not dependent on ‘through composing everything’ in advance. Instantly call from a ‘repertoire’ of themes and variations…snap…just like that!
“Modern” GUIs have their pros and cons. One of the pros is they ‘try’ to be more visually intuitive. They do keep things in mind like “ADD”, and attempt to present data in ‘smaller chunks’ that force more ‘standard and uniform workflows’.
One of the cons however, is how they take away ‘cognitive’ concepts and ‘totally’ replace them with ‘constructivist’ thinking. The ‘ADD Friendly Chunks’ are often ‘too small’, and even more ‘confusing’ than just throwing it all up there in a simple spread sheet, and sometimes even a ‘script’ format is easier to follow and manipulate than all that ‘chunked and subdivided graphical mess’ everywhere that can have ‘inter-related’ variables off in ‘worlds of their own’ when they shouldn’t be!
They push the idea that ‘no one should ever need to read a user manual’. They even ‘refuse’ to provide the ‘specs and technical data’ for users to craft their own workflows. All that stuff used to be ‘standard issue’ with music equipment/software. The USER could look up every memory address, and manipulate it if he wanted/needed. He could ‘pick and choose’ what that arcane little screen should be showing, when, and HOW. So ‘progress’ is to increasingly ‘hide’ most of that (because power user UIs are too ‘cluttered’, arcane and obsolete?) and leave us ‘in the dark’ and at the mercy of ‘wading through a modern GUI’ or spending all day hunting Youtube Videos?
Things I could with ONE click on my ‘arcane MPC’ unit, or a couple of keystrokes on the qwerty take miles of ‘scrolling, hunting, dragging’ in ‘modern interfaces’.
Case in point:
The old ‘arcane’ drum map looks like this…(Clean, powerful, easy to use. All from one page. Deals with staff position, instrument output, device triggering, note shapes, and more. All right here! Add some more features to the program at some point that need more data fields [which has happened over the course of development]? No sweat, just add another ‘column’ to this!)
The ‘modern one’ is more like this (Not saying it’s terrible, but not really an ‘improvement’ in my opinion. In BOTH, it’s sometimes much easier/better to just break out an old XML editor. At least then it’s easy to clone stuff, batch change entire sets of parameters, and more):
And we still need several more like it to get it mapped out on a stave!
I suppose the latter looks and feels a little more like a drum stave, but it’s far more ‘fiddly and cumbersome’ to setup. I haven’t seen usability studies and research of that nature…but ‘to me’ the ‘old and out of date’ UI comes across as being more ‘intuitive’. Our IQ isn’t so low that we can’t sort out what cells in a big and simple spread sheet grid do/mean. Attention span on the other hand does change from generation to generation. I get it, but still…with every pro comes new sets of cons, and vice verse.
It’s fine that constructivist approaches can be added, but far too often they ‘strip out’ the stuff that was really ‘efficient’, and often even ‘easier to use’ in the process. We just needed to take a minute to ‘read the manual’ first.
Concepts like, “Making a 4 line script to automate something that’d take 482 clicks/drags/etc” start to disappear (at least in the ‘transition periods’ from ‘obsolete to new and improved’).
Case in point: In Cubase I can find and adjust the velocity of every single note of the project within’ a certain proximity of ‘the beat’ in less than 15 seconds (even less if I’ve already done it before and saved a macro/logic-editor). I can ‘invert’ a melody, or do a rhythm in ‘retrograde’ in a click. I can build a chord track in minutes, and use a lot of ‘obsolete and arcane graphical tools’ to plan the progression and lock to voicing to a plethora of different sets of rules.
“Fossils” like Sibelius, and even Finale provide some advanced features for this sort of thing as well (you do have to ‘read a manual’ to know they exist, and practice a bit though). Please don’t get me wrong…I love using Dorico. Love the way it engraves and saves time with many aspects of getting a score onto paper. I’m just saying that from that ‘fresh start’ at Dorico 1, to the version 5 we have today…it’s taken a while to ‘get us here’, and there is still some catching up to do in some work-flow aspects. LUA is going to be ‘amazing’ with Dorico…but by the time we users get documentation and start to master it, someone will come out yelling, “This is obsolete! Time to move on!”
I can’t do quite a few things yet in Dorico (I know it’s coming…but not quite there yet) that many people out there might consider ‘arcane and obsolete’ (they never knew it existed, and probably will never miss it).
The whole ‘design flaw’ of GA in this case? They added a new dimension to the plugin at some point (A drum machine system with pattern pads that need to be triggered SOMEHOW). I suppose if they’d split the ‘pattern groups’ into a ‘separate plugin’ it’d be OBVIOUS that it’s kind of like two different instruments wrapped into one. To me, it’s pretty obvious anyway, especially after spending 30 to 45 minutes browsing the manual. Having used at least a half a dozen other hosts over all this time, it’s also obvious to me that the designers went to a lot of trouble to make sure the plugin would be useable in most, if not all of them.
Want to get rid of that ‘design flaw’? Alright…roll back to Groove Agent ONE (Assuming it’ll work in Dorico, and without an old USB dongle). You’ll lose a lot of 'content, and it doesn’t have the drum machine at all…or the HALion based scripting support for macros and such (some new screens on the market make all those years of HALion development ‘obsolete’? It only took decades to get where it is. No big deal. Start from scratch?).
It’s crazy really. $99 bucks gets us an upgrade that provides a really nice new instrument, a kind of ‘commitment’ to begin ‘supporting’ the instrument better in future releases, and quite a few significant improvements to the playback engine, and we can still find ways to be upset by it.
It’s not perfect, but I’m enjoying this release so far. 99$ seems fair enough to me (these guys need a regular pay day to keep on working). I can finally implement legato playback the way I want, and my instruments can be a little ‘smarter’ in ‘interpreting scores’!
