What version of Doriko do you use and how much did you pay for it? Are you satisfied with it compared to Sibelius and Finale?
Which is harder to learn: Doriko, Sibelius, or Finale?
After using Finale for 32 years, I switched to Dorico about 2.5 years ago, now running the latest version of 5 Pro. (I paid the standard cross-grade price.)
It’s difficult to know exactly how to answer your question about learning. Since Finale and computer music notation in general were still very “young” when I first started learning, there was always lots of big new things to learn.
Dorico, with its emphasis on the musical semantics of symbols vs. Finale’s more graphical-object orientation, I had to “unlearn” lots of Finale behaviors in order to work best with Dorico as a tool and get the (great-looking) results it’s designed to achieve.
My approach, after trying to “dive in” and just start using Dorico, was to stop back for awhile when I had a gap in deadline projects and spend time with a number of the videos on Steinberg’s Dorico YouTube page, pausing frequently to try out the techniques being discussed. I also spent lots of time using this forum as a learning tool, with questions posed each day becoming exercises for me to pursue.
I will say that the design of Dorico is very logical and consistent, so learning really speeds up over time.
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You will get many different answers to this question, because it all depends on the particular user and what he or she wants to use Dorico for.
I was a heavy Finale user for 25 years, until their announcement in August. I took a look at Dorico, Sibelius, and MuseScore, and I found that Dorico matched my workflow the best. I bought it a couple of weeks later with the Finale discount, and I haven’t looked back; Dorico isn’t perfect, but it’s a much better piece of software than Finale is/was.
Personally, I have not found it hard to learn how to use Dorico, although I have had to get rid of some well-established mental and physical habits I had from Finale. I find the help pages very useful, and this forum is a fantastic resource.
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If you are not familiar with Finale or Sibelius, you may actually have an easier time learning Dorico, because you will have fewer instincts/bad habits to break.
I personally would not be satisfied with anything less than Dorico’s Pro version.
I say this as someone who used Finale from its first appearance and was rather happy with it, but i could see the future was Dorico, so I started switching over gradually in 2016.
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I used Finale since version 3.0.
I switched to Dorico a few years ago, and for me, Dorico was easier to learn than Finale.
But then, I already had an idea of some tips and tricks on how to facilitate learning (like always having a little notebook next to me and jotting down common commands that I tended to forget.)
Sure, there are some things that were more tedious at first to do in Dorico, but once I got used to the logic of it, it was actually easier than doing it in Finale.
So Dorico Pro for me, and I could never dream of going back to Finale. You couldn’t pay me enough to return to the nightmare that Finale turned out to be.
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I always found Finale maddening to use. Tools buried within tools within tools and dialogues within dialogues. To say the program was opaque is a polite understatement.
Sibelius was fairly straightforward.
Dorico’s learning curve was a bit higher only because I had to un-learn a few habits and expectations that I picked up from the preceding two programs. It takes a while to get the lay of the land and remember where everything is located. That said, it is no more difficult than any other professional-grade program that I use. It is one among many, and they all require you to put in a commensurate amount of learning to get the most out of them. Welcome to computing, my friend.
In any case, Dorico was the winner for me (by no small margin, mind) and I recommend it to anyone who will listen. It’s worth it.
Merry Christmas
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For me, it was not a matter of Dorico being difficult but more that it was different. After reading an absolute minimum amount of documentation (just enough to get myself started), like all new users with their “new toy” who just wanted to dive in and get things happening straight away, I tried to “wing it” by trial and error. Having discovered that some of the terminology and a few key commands were the same as in other notation software, I unconsciously assumed that so much more of Dorico would be “intuitive”, namely the same as I was already accustomed to. WROOONG!! After convincing myself that I needed to deliberately ignore my experience of how other software works and attempt to learn how Dorico works, I made progress. This was helped by working through the First Steps, as I learn most effectively by doing the theory and the “prac.” at the same time - the theory explains the prac. and the prac. consolidates the understanding in the brain. The various Dorico videos have also been of great assistance.
After using Dorico for four years, I have almost completely forgotten how Sibelius works and what its key commands are. So much so that I have to consult its manual! Also, I stopped paying the annual subscription for Sibelius nearly a year ago because, for the minuscule amount of note entry I actually did in Sibelius, it was starting to feel like each note I input was costing me a dollar. To be fair to Sibelius, I do use it for opening old files and exporting to musicxml for reworking in Dorico. That and, as is my sole use of MuseScore (which I find so absolutely uninspiring in so many areas), importing problematic musicxml files to compare with Dorico’s import of those files.
If I was asked for advice by new Dorico users, I would recommend to put aside what has been learnt elsewhere in their notation software experience and invest some time and effort in actually learning “the Dorico way” rather than assuming that it will be “easy enough to work out”.
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