As I’m learning Dorico, I’m seeing how it’s going to eventually be a wonderful piece of software for me, and I’ll list the positives on another thread. I’ve been loving teaching myself Reaper and Adobe Premiere lately, but learning Dorico has felt like a bit of a slog. Every action ultimately has a clever way to achieve it, but I have not found very much that’s intuitive.
The very first action I tried to take stymied me. I wanted to add more bars. I like to see a canvas of empty bars in front of me before I input a note.
Start of selection - 32 Bars - Click Add Bars…nothing. No pop up as to why bars weren’t added, just nothing. 5 minutes of googling later I find that I need to create a time signature in order to add bars. Totally makes sense, but I wish there had been some sort of pop up telling me why the action didn’t work.
It took me several minutes to figure out how to manipulate playback. After opening up the pop up transport, I found rewind and fast-forward, but these are very slow, and I wanted to hear a tremolo section towards the end of the piece. Eventually I found that “P” plays from the selection…which is brilliant, but that took a while to figure out. Seeing the playback head on stop should be a default setting IMO. Also, I’d love it if I could double click the transport’s bar numbers and move the playhead to the measure that is inputted.
Creating players was very slow. I was writing for a nontraditional ensemble, and the fact that it exited me out of the add players dialog every time I added someone was frustrating.
I found the playback to be very pleasing sounding, but not very articulate for strings. I tried to switch patches on Halion, but the expression maps didn’t change accordingly, and I heard load of keyswitches being played (very low notes pulsing loudly). I wish that there was an easy way to choose a very simple and balanced string sound with all the articulations ready to go. Doesn’t need to sound good, just clear and balanced through the range and through different articulations.
Things are going faster now that I’ve learned some things. XML import worked amazingly well. The tempo map function paired with importing a video (mp3 attached to a still image in a .mov file) is brilliant, and will ultimately sway me to purchase this software after the demo expires. The ability to stay away from the mouse while inputting notes makes things really fast, and there’s loads to love about this software. Thanks Steinberg for all of your hard work!