I mentioned this in another thread, but if you had, for instance, purchased Dorico Pro 2 today without a previous version, it would still cost you $579. The $99 upgrade price for previous owners on top of the base price effectively means that you’re not paying for the new features; you’re paying for the use of Dorico for however many months (or years) that you have owned it. For me, that’s a year, and in a year, I’ve engraved two editions of sacred choral pieces, re-orchestrated the lion’s share of an orchestra piece for concert band, and composed an opera, start to finish. For me, the ability to do so has been well worth the $99, especially given that it would’ve taken months longer in Finale, at minimum.
It could be the case that you really haven’t gotten $99 worth of value out of the program since you’ve owned it, but for those of us that have, one hardly needs to be a fanboy to point out as much.
I disagree. For example, for “free” programs like facebook and gmail, you become the product. They sell your private information to advertisers, and as we have learned this can sway very important elections as a side effect. As a customer, it’s very important to pull back the veil on how products are supported so you understand what risk you are taking investing in that product. The Dorico team charges what their time and energy is worth, which allows them to introduce every feature with a paradigm-shattering approach. Coming up with these approaches requires keeping developers fresh and creative, and that means more money has to be invested in the developers than a more traditional model. You absolutely get what you pay for in software, and with Dorico, you get a luxury car experience with every feature, and several quick updates that often introduce entirely new dramatic features for free.
I am little confused about those who are so willing to call many of us “fan boys”. I feel that this statement can only be made by someone who has never worked with Finale and Sibelius immediately upon the exit of the now Steinberg development team. You may call me a “fan boy” if you’d like. I don’t care, and it certainly doesn’t hurt my feelings. Having worked for over 25 years in Finale and seeing the same bugs NEVER get fixed, or worse off you submit a bug report and there is never a response to your submission, to the EXACT opposite here with Dorico… yeah, you could say I am a HUGE FAN of the work being done. With Finale and Sibelius after the team left, your concern is not taken serious. Or at least to the customer interacting with software and the company it certainly does not seem like your concern is taken seriously. Because I can directly communicate with Daniel, Paul, et al., is a HUGE reason I jumped in to Dorico even though it WOULD NOT work for me. I was supporting a team (and an idea of customer service) that is so incredibly helpful, honest, and as transparent as they can be.
I also think it is sad, because a few of us can remember working with Finale on Windows 3.1, and working with Sibelius 1.0 on Windows 98. Many of us saw the slow development of these programs over the decades. Some of the new people now jumped in when 85% of these programs were in place. They never saw the growing pains the rest of us had to endure. Who remembers when Finale had to “extract” parts. And that “Extracting” parts literally could take 30 minutes to an hour for a 4 staff piece work? I think some people expect the software to be as “mature” as the others.
I feel the $99 was too little for the upgrade personally. And I would gladly fork over another $99 right now. I feel it is very much worth it. I did a lot of engraving work just over a year ago in Finale. That work later was published by one of the top three music publishers in the world (of course they edited my work to their house style), and I cannot tell you the number of bug reports I sent in to MakeMusic to hear NOTHING back. The constant hanging, the constant “why is the lyric tool not working”, the “don’t hit the print button, until you open the preferences and close the preferences just because Finale can get confused and crash”, etc. To having software that when I do something, it works. How invaluable. The small independent music publisher I work for has now published 3 books using stuff I have redone in Dorico. The effort in Dorico has been at least twice as fast, if not more. And the look is nothing but professional. I can recall putting together one of the books I most recently did in Finale 16 years ago, and I can tell you I did it in half the time. So few software glitches, etc. Like I said, I would gladly pay another $99 right now for how great this software has been, not only in implementation of ideas and work flows, but just the overall stability.
Dorico does not do everything I need it to, even now. I was 100% aware of this going in. I bought it anyway. I wasn’t investing in what I need right now… I was investing in a future that looked beyond incredible. And to this day, I still feel that as being true.
There is reason why Dorico created such a “buzz” before it even had a name. People who really use notation software are tired and fed up with software that doesn’t seem to be helping the users’ needs. They are tired of hearing, “thanks for the report. we will look into it.” They are tired of seeing “give us $299 for another year of maintenance updates”. Or, “look at what the new version does… this insignificant improvement that doesn’t add any value to any body except for Steve in California and Bob over in Indiana.”
I can appreciate that you don’t want to pay $99. Who wants to spend money when you could save it? But from A LOT of experience, I can tell you that what you have before is already a serious game changer. And whatever money is spent into the new version will only help to ensure the success of Dorico for years to come.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying! Thank you. If there was a list of which essential features were going to be left out until the first paid upgrade, I would have likely waited until then, or not even bothered in the first place.
Cool, you can pay for my upgrade then!
If by free you mean that I paid for something in advance with the understanding that I would get it eventually (i.e. simple things like slash notation and 1 measure repeats especially), then…sure!
I’ll take that as – if you had the ability criticize the content of the argument, rather than the format, you would have…thanks!
And thank God you didn’t need to use one-bar repeats, or write a slash notation guitar part!!!
Snarkiness aside, I am not trying to make it personal: I feel like there is a consensus that I’m somehow attacking the entire effort of the team. Don’t get me wrong: I am super impressed with this software. Everything else about 2.0 looks completely AWESOME. Look!
Play video in sync with your project, add markers, and manipulate tempo to compose to picture
Edit tempo, dynamics, and MIDI controllers in Play mode with familiar graphical automation control
Add ossias, handle complex divisi writing for string sections, and change the number of staves used by an instrument with smart new staff management tools Quickly write rhythmic slashes and bar repeats for rhythm section parts
Hollywood-style large time signatures draw attention to meter changes in action-packed film score cues
Quickly select, insert, and delete material with the new System Track
Powerful new tools for arrangers, including multi-paste, explode, reduce, and tools to scale existing notes into tuplets of any ratio Playback of repeat structures including repeat barlines and repeat endings
New popover for adding tremolos and repeat endings
Edit the appearance of playing techniques and notehead sets, and define new playback behaviors for playing techniques in VST Expression Maps
I’m trying to say that some of these things are not like the others in scope, and with 100 dollars on the line, it triggers all kinds of alarm bells for me when basic features are withheld and packaged with an advanced feature upgrade. I would pay 100 dollars more in a heartbeat for these other features (if I needed them), but I don’t think anyone can call their product a piece of professional-grade notation software and charge a premium for it unless those two in bold are included! I’m sorry I just don’t think you can. I don’t even care as much about the playback, but if you have playback at all, it should observe repeats. For anyone who ever writes a jazz or pop arrangement or musical theater score, this is non-negotiable. I’m going to beat this car metaphor into the ground just to make Derrek mad, but if your car is a Rolls Royce but it has no side mirrors…
Anyway, I would be perfectly happy to shut up and leave this the hell alone if they just worked those two very simple things into the next update of Dorico 1.
JZiemann, some of us never use bar repeats or slash notation, and don’t give a monkeys about playback (of repeats, or anything else beyond basic proof-reading).
I am one such person. These are not core features to me; they are just as irrelevant to me as figured bass and mensural notation.
The definition of “core feature” comes down to the individual’s circumstances.
As such, v2 feels like an upgrade to you, and an update to me.
Many of the free updates in the past have felt like an upgrade to me, and possibly an update to you.
(edit: I might have muddled my upgrades and updates but the point stands)
The developers are never going to please everyone in one go, but they have families to feed and must be paid.
To give a little context, Sibelius managed to introduce a bug in Sib 8. that meant that manually-hidden rests reappeared, screwing up positioning in parts (including in files that were created years ago). I’ve effectively paid them £85 ($99) JUST for the bug fix. This is what the competition do. Look at what Dorico gives you for your money.
I don’t want to retread old ground with a reply here, but just to take this one point:
We didn’t do anything as cynical as “withhold” a feature in order to extract more money from existing users, though I can certainly understand why you might think that. The simple truth is that selling software without a subscription is a cyclical business, with new versions developing a bump in revenue and its attendant attention to your product, and then that revenue tailing off over time, until you release another new version that provides another bump in revenue and attention. We asked our customers a few years ago whether or not they wanted a subscription model for our software, and the overwhelming answer was “no”.
I personally am not a fan of subscription pricing for software because if the software already does everything you need it to do, having to pay for it on an ongoing basis when you don’t need any new features doesn’t seem right, but if the software doesn’t already do what you need it to do, you usually have no assurances that your subscription fee will deliver the features and improvements that you need.
So Steinberg pursues a sort of middle path: our major products receive regular updates, normally roughly on an annual basis, and those users who stay current pay less for each update than those who skip updates. Customers are free to make a purchase or not based on the capabilities of the software they see before them, and they also suffer no unfair penalty for skipping an update (though they are asked to pay a bit more when they decide to get back in step, which is commensurate with the overall additional functionality they receive by doing so).
Dorico was, and to some extent still is, obviously a special case. The first version was released without a number of features that were originally planned: the product’s needs and the business’s commercial requirements were at odds, and for good reasons we released the first version a lot later than planned but not late enough to give us time to include all the features that we wanted to include. Aside from the first five weeks of Dorico’s time in the market, it has been possible for every customer to try the software out for 30 days in order to see whether its current state offers sufficient value to be worth buying. We put statements on the main marketing page (the very first page you get to when you look for information about Dorico on the Steinberg web site, not buried away in small print somewhere) that explained which kinds of features were not present and which we intended to add, notwithstanding that software development is hard and we had to reserve the right to change those plans (based on things like things being harder to implement than we thought, or commercial needs changing, or whatever the reason might have been). We did a pretty great job, I think, though not a perfect one, of addressing the things on that list. We were even allowed by the company’s leadership to take almost a further six months than originally planned adding features to Dorico 1.x.
But in the end, selling software without a subscription is a cyclical business, and more than 18 months is quite a long cycle. We needed to get the Dorico business onto its planned regular cadence of releases in the late spring or early summer. We needed to introduce Dorico Elements to help unlock the price-sensitive education market. And yes, we needed some revenue from our existing Dorico customers who would hopefully like the new features we had introduced and see $99 worth of value in those features.
So we worked as hard as we could to make the update we released as compelling as possible. Features like bar repeats and rhythm slashes took months of development. If we had decided to release these in one of the earlier Dorico 1.x releases, we would have had to have dropped something else that was considered just as essential to as many or possibly more people, like chord symbols, or percussion, or cues. Every decision to do something comes with an opportunity cost: the lost opportunity to do something else. We could either have completely upset our commercial objectives and missed our release window in order to add more features to Dorico 1.x for free, or we could prioritise our commercial objectives to try and get Dorico onto a sustainable path for long-term success. It might not make you happy, but we decided on the latter. We hope that in the long-term, establishing a rhythm for future Dorico releases, introducing the Elements version, having a new product to sell to the key education market, and so on, will all boost the overall success of the product more than the temporary, or even permanent, loss of existing customers who are upset by our business decisions and either decide to skip this update or abandon Dorico altogether.
The first few days of sales of the update suggest that a good number of our existing customers see enough value in the update to spend their hard-earned money on it, and I am very grateful for that. I don’t expect that spelling out the commercial realities of selling niche software products like Dorico will make you any happier about the situation: you expected something, we didn’t deliver it, despite the fact that we could not make specific promises to do that, and you’re not happy about it. I’m sorry: I very much want you and all of our customers to be happy, and I and the rest of the team work stupidly hard to try to make you happy. But we had to perform a delicate balancing act, and releasing this update now wasn’t done cynically to try to extract maximum money from existing customers: it was the best balance we could strike between the needs of our existing users and the longer-term needs of the Dorico product family overall. I hope that this at least allows you to see some of the factors we have to think about beyond simply which features get developed when.
Of course, I am biased, but I think the pricing is reasonable. (to add to the other part of the convo- I was born without the ability to reproduce, but that feature appeared a few years later )
I have to disagree. I’ve always had a response from Makemusic, the problem is that the replies are from individuals who don’t know how Finale works. (When I mentioned this on Twitter once, it caused quite a stir …)
It is very important for me (a customer) that Dorico is sustainable as a business. Igor Engraver was a great piece of software with functionality that Sib and Fin only got years later. But…the business was never on a sure footing. I (and others) even bought extra unneeded copies as a contribution to the company’s finances. I see Dorico as revolutionising my workflow for the next decades. Being part of Yamaha/Steinberg puts Dorico in a good place. It is in my interest that the software delivers for them.
How true!!! Since the car analogy has been mentioned a couple of times… I wonder if any one of you who find the cost hard to swallow ever owned a car - and tried to maintain it according to the manufacturer’s recommendation…?
The second I noticed the 2.0 upgrade I started the process to order it, download it and install it. I was very excited, and my expectations were rewarded, not just in the big exciting features, but in little tweaks, and a generally smoother performance.
I get how people can be frustrated when they are burning with a need to either do something immediately, or have something which will allow that need to be fulfilled, and and are ferociously impatient with anything that stands in their way. I’m that way myself sometimes.
But I didn’t wanted to go back to Sibelius (7.5) wonderful programme though it is, right from the start (and notwithstanding the “Investment Fallacy”) because for some key elements Dorico is far and away the next level, for what I need and is certainly a better deal, even with a yearly paid upgrade.
There are still thing Dorico can do better, and I don’t expect it will ever be perfect, but I’m astonished and very, very grateful that I’ve lived long enough to see notation software reach this level of utility, and just as grateful for the openness, accessibility, vision and enthusiasm of the Dorico team and their apparently wise management. I trust these people, and in the meantime work as efficiently as I can on my own music and find workarounds (fewer and fewer with each update) when they’re necessary.
No-one is going to please everybody; it’s just not possible. Just like every need in my own contradictory psyche isn’t going to be met by anything that affects it. That’s not how the world is or ever was.
Stepping. Off. Soapbox.
Now.
j
Ok, you might be 100% correct here. I “might” have received a few notifications in return that seemed like the person had no clue what I was talking about.
Professional software costs money, something we seem to forget all to easily in these days of cheap apps, free OS upgrades etc.
I bought the Dorico update the moment I saw it was available, and also renewed my Sibelius subscription for another year. Each month, my organisation pays about €140 for Adobe’s professional suite and €70 a month, per user, for professional grade remote desktop solutions, bespoke software solutions etc. In the light of that, €99 every 18 months or so for a Dorico is actually very good value compared with other professional solutions.
This is a crazy thread! I’ve paid $1k plus for single use software and it was and still is, worth every penny. It paid for itself in no time and continues to earn me money etc. Dorico 2, for those that use it commercially, is no different. How can anyone justify falling out with Steinberg over the $100 asked! All things considered, the support for this software is exemplary. It appears some genuine perspective is certainly required here.
Hi, fuzzydude.
Please don’t forget that there are people out there who bought Dorico in its early stage, hoping that Dorico will fulfill their needs in the near future. Some of them might not yet be able to “earn money” using the software because of one or the other missing feature that might be totally unimportant for you and me, but is crucial for them. They see all the shiny you and me are able to work with, but they have to stick with their old tools that look even older once you see Dorico, and they get grumpy because they want to use the new shiny thingy.
The frustration of seeing great things you want but can’t have is real, not only for kids
I remember score and winscore (some still use it and it still is a great engraving program. but dos? and winscore never really got off the ground as it should). shall we mention how many of us were excited when we had score or music printer plus, coming from pen and ink and just editing inserts and extracting being a nightmare. it takes time and money for a company to develop a program, particularly today. As in everything today we have an impatient culture. Dorico is doing an amazing job in developing dorico. I am as anxious as anyone for “my needed features” to rise to the top but have not only occasionally use dorico but use it more of the time, only returning to another program such as sibelius when I must. Miss the “hide staves, boxing musical notes, extended arrows to show length of time to play boxed notes.” it will come. oh lord, it will. let’s keep steinberg in business and developing this new software. it’s clearly more than worth it.
