I have a new challenge I need to figure out. I’m writing an orchestration over an existing recording that’s piano-voice only.
I know how to import it to Dorico, but how do I synchronize the score to the recording?
I should add that the original recording wasn’t time-mapped in any way.
Do you have Cubase? Its warping feature may help you align varying tempo with measures.
I don’t, no. I use Studio One. If Cubase provides a good solution to this, I’d get it just for that. I’ll look into it.
Edit: it looks like it does the opposite of what I’m looking for. I want to keep the original performance exactly as it was recorded, and set the tempo changes as needed to match it.
I’ll ask on the Cubase forum to see if there’s any feature like this. Sounds like it something that might have to take place outside of Dorico, then.
Is that not what the Dorico Find Tempo dialog does? Treat your original as a video without pictures.
(just guessing here)
Cubase has a feature called ‘tempo detection’ where it analyzes a piece of audio or midi and creates a bunch of tempo changes to make the strong transients it finds, match the grid. I have experimented with this feature and it works, although not in the context you are talking about…I’ve only used it with midi recordings played in without a click. Not sure quite how easy it would be to get the resulting tempo map into Dorico, but I expect it be possible….I’m thinking you could save the resulting Cubase song with the tempo changes as a midi file and import that into Dorico. Logic also has a similar tempo detection feature apparently. I’m surprised that Studio One doesn’t have something similar….the Cubase tempo detection feature has been around for several years I think.
I have done this succesfully simply by drawing into the tempo track of dorico. It is not as hard as you might think once you get the hang of it!
So load in the audio as an video file and draw the tempo in manually (it is probably easier in dorico 3.5 at the moment)
Oof, that seems tedious…
I guess it depends on the original material - my piece was quite consitently in tempo so I needed to check the timing every 4 bars or so. But I just simply started from the beginning and made tiny adjustments whenever dorico was ahead/behind the original audio. The line tool seemed to be the best for the job.
I guess you could map the tempo somewhere else and then import to dorico, but I felt that with this method the workflow was as fast in dorico as it would have been in a DAW.
Well, I think I just found a solution! Melodyne 5 can do complex tempo detection in one click. That creates a tempo map, which I can import into Dorico. Sounds perfect; we’ll see…
Good luck, looking forward to hear how it worked out! 
FWIW, I asked John to do a discover session on exactly that, and asked Cubase experts exactly that, but so far, I’ve been doing exactly what SampoKasurinen does, which works but takes time, especially when many rubatos are involved. Still wishing some input from a Cubase specialist to get a nice, consistent, efficient workflow for this kind of task.
I came here hoping to find a solution to this. As a cubase user, it would be wonderful to be able to import an audio track and also import a tempo track.
It looks like the great @Dom_Sigalas (Dorico user too) has just released a video about what I was needing. Unfortunately it’s a long process when dealing with “classical” music (no sharp transients to detect beats). I will try and apply that technique though, when I have some time, and will report back.
It is indeed! I just tried applying Dom’s method to Bruckner 2nd (Thielemann) 1st movement, in Cubase. You are quite right - this means going bar by bar, stopping playback, manually warping the tempo grid, then restarting the playback to check, then moving the next bar or two, and so on. It’s possible to be extremely precise but the cost of that is a ton of manual work for a ~600 movement.
The other Cubase feature, the tempo detection panel, can make a rough tempo outline of the entire track automatically - very quickly - as long as the audio file is positioned so that the first beat sounds in the correct place within the bar. In this Bruckner piece it got the tempo badly wrong in a few places (all related to offbeats), but this method still seems like a better alternative for longer works - the potential workflow here seems to be to restrict manual corrections to the problem spots.
Personally, I would love an ability to play an audio(video) file in Dorico and tap the spacebar along to mark the beats and generate a resulting tempo track. This would be more reliable than hitpoints and possibly more enjoyable and musically useful. 
I too struggle with this. I do lots of transcriptions for my band and end up with multiple tempo changes as I detect the audio is getting ahead or lagging behind dorico’s tempo. It would be a good discover dorico session. I seem to recall there was a snippet in one long ago but I can’t find it. I haven’t tried drawing in the tempo map per se…just detecting when audio is ahead or behind, and going back a few measure and adding another metronome marking to try to speed up or slow down a bit.
Has there been any further progress or information on this issue? Thanks for any suggestions.
No. I ended up creating a tempo map in Studio One. As the recording progresses, I set up the X key to split the waveform in realtime at the cursor. Then I map the tempo to the splits, export the tempo map, and import that into Dorico.
It’s tedious, but absolutely perfectly aligned to the audio track.
Thanks Dan. Yes, it’s tedious that way, but it looks like it must be done! I’m on Cubase rather than Studio One, but the process is probably similar. Let’s hope that future versions of Dorico will make this easier, since this is something that a lot of people have need of.
Melodyne is pretty good at tempo recognition and also can export midi tempo files. But I don’t know if it can deal with complex classical music…