I have composed a lot of orchestral music using various DAWs such as Reaper, FLStudio, Sonar Cakewalk, Reason 10 (which finally allows VSTs), etc.
I haven’t bought Cubase yet due to the high price but I’m interested in purchasing Dorico Pro or Elements.
Would it be possible to import midi data from any of these non-Steignberg products into Dorico?
Yes, and the forthcoming update has many improvements to midi import.
That is great news.
I will read a lot more about the things Dorico can do later tonight but I’m curious about one thing.
Let’s say I import a song, will it auto separate each track or do I need to import track by track?
I assume that I will need to assign which MIDI tracks go to their correct instruments on my own yes?
Yes. For “smarter” import, use MusicXML when possible.
Dan is correct to say that if you have an application that exports MusicXML then it’s always worth trying to use that first. If you don’t (or if you haven’t quantized everything in your DAW) then try with MIDI. Or try both and copy and paste to get the most useful bits (eg you might find the MusicXML export for the drum kit isn’t as you would expect).
For MIDI, we don’t yet have a dialog to allow you to set the instruments you want to import to, but it tries to have a guess based on the track names. For the best results, track names reflecting the instrument such as ‘Piano’ will work better than ‘Pno Ivory Grand v3 - right hand’