I'm thinking of swapping to Dorico from Finale & Sibelius

Hi, both Finale and Sibelius have a vast array of compositional tools and features, in particular the ability to invert and retrograde musical phrases, how does Dorico compare to Finale and Sibelius?

That is not possible at the moment.
If this is something important for your workflow, I’d suggest that you consider if the time saved by rest of capabilities of Dorico surpass the time spent by retrograding or inverting by hand, or elsewhere and then importing via MusicXML. In my opinion, oh boy it does!

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There are plenty of free inversion and retrograde matrix calculators online that you can use too, rather than having notation software calculate them. I’ve used this simple one before.

Keep in mind that there is a 30-day trial version of Dorico you can download and explore. Your best option is to download the Pro version of the trial, since you can then use keypress combinations on boot-up to sample the more limited versions Elements and SE.

Yet if one asks for the Elements trial download, it will come with an Elements activation code that cuts one off from the Pro trial. Right?

Sorry, I’m being unnecessarily picky. I’ve retracted that post so as not to cause confusion. I agree with you on all fronts :slight_smile:

I like to do these things from scratch as I think it’s good for these techniques to go through the human brain. I rarely use inversions and never strict retrograde but do use permutations and substitutions. For me therefore the advantages of Dorico outweigh the few lack of facilities and this would not be a problem for me.
I have not tried it but you could do the thematic transformations in Finale and then inport them into Dorico as an XML file.

During lockdown (in order to stop going mad) I decided to write some code (in C) that created various developments of themes but I have not really used them. One divided two themes into four note groups; if the first interval of a group in Theme A, was the same as the first interval of a group in Theme B, the Theme A group would replace the Theme B group transposed to match the interval.

If you already have Sib/Finale then you can continue to use their tools whilst working mostly in Dorico.

Just export a flow from Dorico containing the material you want to manipulate. Import it into Sib/Finale and make your changes. Then send it back into Dorico and import as a new flow.

One of the delights of Dorico is how flows work!

For what it’s worth, we do plan to add a suite of tools for manipulating existing music with these kinds of transformations in a future version.

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I have various dice for some compositional practices. E,g, the 13-side die covers the chromatic scale + 1 extra for ‘end of sequence’ 15-side one for shorter sequences and the more usual 6 for ‘shall I use a repeated number’ or not, odds or evens.
I wouldn’t expect Dorico to code a facility for that. Besides it would take the fun out of doing such things myself.