Depends on the type of media music - I’m writing for games which can mean a lot of things, but just a straight up score that triggers is most common (Civ, Crusader Kings, etc etc) In some engines the option is there for aleatoric. Particularly in UE5 with the new audio team Epic has, they’ve put in a programmatic music system.
With limitations of course, built in it is a programmatic synthesizer, but you can trigger wav’s with microsecond timing (audio is on it’s own thread). Its used, for example, with environmental sounds, where a degree of ‘intentional randomness’ is the best approach.
Anyhow I’ve not seen a lot of games doing this kind of music, most of the time it’s triggered wav’s with straight up scores.
The Library Manager really gets very little acclaim. And in truth, the Library Manager became a necessity because of the brilliance/elegance of the product’s underlying architecture to make essentially everything parameterized. True to form, the library manager makes it practical to manage the (what must be by now) thousands of available parameters while maintaining some kind of sanity/coherence.
No other product in this market segment will ever have that feature because none of them have the underlying architectural elegance and discipline.
While we would all like to see more developers, much of the really hard work is truly done, and the library manager is a major accomplishment along that path. The other side of the Library Manager coin is the UI for setting the parameters in the first place (i.e. the engraving, notation, playback panels et al) Both the UI and the Library Manager are scalable to deal with as many parameters need to be exposed in the future.
That’s for sure. I’ve said it before but how often does a team with deep experience get a chance for a do-over? Not in my 30 years has that happened. Putting aside changing technologies and professional best practices which all improve, maybe the Achilles heel of software development is that the assumptions of your initial architecture determine thereafter what can be done with it. The second are what’s called cross cutting concerns, which are things that span the architecture and must be handled really carefully as it’s a limiting boundary condition that touches and constrains everything.
Daniel has said the guiding principles/assumptions are Engraving, Usability and Playback, these are functional requirements. The non obvious perfect choice to base your system on, engraving is a given, usability is usually a non functional requirement which means apps meet it to a greater or lesser degree, and playback is interesting one. Not obvious that it should be first order requirement, but we’re seeing the benefit of it now. Having such first rate easy playback (Dorico does so much for you) is a game changer that wasn’t obvious (to me) until we had it. Why? Because for those who need audio output Dorico is rapidly taking away the burden of playback, which is (was) huge. It’s actually kind of a type of usability.
The major cross cutting concern is probably music data, looks like they tame this with a MVC pattern and probably some deep class derivation tree for the data.
The Dorico Library Manager is truly a major achievement. I only wish the internal Dorico Library Manager for transferring parameters and the external Steinberg Library Manager for moving sound files had different names to avoid confusion, since both utilities are important to Dorico users.
Overall, for me this is a great and major release. Dorico has developed massively since its introduction and has been well worth the modest upgrade costs - which after all are not mandatory, so in no way a subscription.
I probably won’t renew Sibelius this time around. But, if I did - for one year’s use - it would cost me the equivalent of about two Dorico upgrades.
Can I just send a plea to the dev team to put a simple graphic box that anchors around specific notes higher on the priority list than playback for aleatoric music? Someday I’m sure Dorico will blow everybody’s socks off with amazing playback of aleatoric music. But even I can tell that’s a huge project! In the meantime, I would be so grateful just for the box, with no playback.
Yes, agreed. I’ll say, this update doesn’t affect me a ton as playback isn’t a priority, but I can see the immense work that was done. I’m hopeful the more notation-centric stuff that are on my wish list will get some progress as we go forward.