I understand the import feature of audio has been requested several times.
Is there a roadmap in place for this feature? It’s been asked since at least 2016 on this forum and the answer then was ‘it’s in development’.
I’d like to invest money into Dorico, but this is quite bad. Is there any time-commitment to this feature request?
Welcome, David.
The team don’t generally confirm what new features will be in future releases (because software development is tricky). Though they are otherwise pretty candid.
You can create a video file of your audio, and import that. I believe there are ways to automate the process and make it quicker.
If the feature had been in development since 2016, then it really should have been along before now… 
We haven’t yet been able to prioritise this feature. To make audio support work the way we want to, we need support for multiple audio tracks in the shared audio engine, and that means our colleagues in the Cubase team being able to spare the time to work on these features for us.
We have some really great ideas for features once this is possible, but until we can get together with the audio engine team and work on this, I’m afraid there will still be a while to wait.
You can also have the audio in a DAW (for example Logic Pro) and sync that to dorico with TXL-timecode plugin:
Learning this workflow takes some time, but when it works you have all of the power of a DAW (to cut, mix, slow down, transpose etc… the audio).
However, for the sync to be solid, the computer needs to be fast enough (I have found it to be a bit ”wobbly” with an older computer).
Just out of curiousity, what does this exactly mean? Doesn’t Cubase audio engine, which is shared with Dorico, already support multiple audio track?
The audio engine is capable of many things, however it needs to be packaged and interfaced in a way that is suitable for Dorico to use. Also lots of the functionality of Cubase is in the application layer and so there is a significant amount of work to be done to move some of that from the application layer to the engine layer.
Maybe you need to take your audio engine team out for pizza, and have more out-of-hours activities with them! 
Sincerely though, this seems like a fundamental feature and should have more managerial pressure imposed from above to ‘make this happen’ - rather than having ‘we just have to wait’ mentality.
It seems to me that fundamentally this is a managerial issue (or lack of…), more than a ‘it’s difficult to code’ issue.
Closing thought, another managerial issue is ‘managing expectations’. Your candid answer is much appreciated, but the management should do more in managing expectations of the users, rather than allowing support teams to give vague, non-committal responses.
Sorry if this comes across a bit polemical.
Actually, it does!
As a developer, I can assure you that it’s much more complicated than that…
Yes I can imagine there are lots of cultural reasons why the status quo is as it is. I imagine German culture to be overly polite, perhaps no-one likes to rock the boat (unlike me!).
Welcome to the forum. You’ll find here that accusatory replies mixed with “Do better” don’t get you anywhere; quite the reverse actually.
Let’s normalize politeness being a thing for everybody, not just Germans.
Thanks for the heads up Dan!
There are limits to politeness though.
I dunno waiting 8 years for a solution - maybe you could argue 4 years , and still getting a vague, uncommitted answer.
It was only when I pressed the issue that we now have clarity on the why this is an issue has been outstanding for many, many years.
I think I’ve been blunt but polite as well, and I’ve offered solutions.
I’d prefer the world to be more direct and honest but in a polite, gracious manner.
We’re giving you feedback that you weren’t polite or gracious, and offering a solution.
Let’s take a step back here, everyone. I appreciate the attempt to keep the tone here civil and polite, but let’s not make the cure worse than the disease. I don’t think David meant any offence, and I for one didn’t take any.
In the end, nobody outside of Steinberg who isn’t intimately involved in the discussions that go on concerning prioritisation and how to allocate our limited development resources can’t know the facts. I can’t (and in any case wouldn’t) provide chapter and verse of internal discussions.
Even vague information coming directly from the horse’s mouth (I’m the horse in this scenario) is better than no information, so you’ll have to make do with vague information.
If you think the replies here are “vague and non-committal”, you could have this, which I received less than a year ago from “a former competitor”:
“Unfortunately, I have no timeframe for an update to that. However, I can assure you that we remain committed to…”
Or try the website for Encore version 6, which proudly proclaims that it will be available in Winter 2023, with no further comment, despite daily requests.