Put two hairpins under one note. It doesn’t look as pretty but it plays back fine.
Thanks Rob, I’ll give it a go. It’s not as easy as it sounds though, have lots of scores imported from XML with LOTS of these. In fact I thought most of them were cresc + dim anyway…
I’ve enjoyed reading this thread. Thank you all for your input. I tend to agree with Jack on a number of issues. I don’t hate Dorico, and I’m amazed at that anyone can create any notation software. Though sometimes I long for the days of pen and paper. 
I have used Score, next Finale, next Sibelius, and now Dorico. Score was a nice effort way back in the day though is was too primitive at that time for me, and I appreciated Finale. But, I bought Sibelius, and I was able to use it immediately without looking at any manual, as it was quite intuitive.
Dorico came out, and I was one of the first ones to use it and have kept up with the updates. But, in my humble opinion it is not intuitive at all. But, I’m OK with working hard to learn it.
My biggest complaint with Dorico is that if you are going to put out a product that changes the way composers compose, instead of just making it easier for composers to compose the way they always have, then you’d better have solid documentation.
I believe Dorico does not.
The Dorico manual is 1,070 pages long. I appreciate their effort in putting it together, but some basics are simply not there. Let’s say I am a beginner and I wanted to learn how to add a measure. In my opinion, I feel that I should be able to go to the index and look up: measures - adding and then travel to the page with the proper instructions and get the information I need. Nope…not there.
I personally know some A-list orchestrators in the film industry (Hollywoood) who wilAl not use Dorico. They are staying with Sibelius. I admire the Dorico team for what they are doing. I certainly could not do it. But, when it comes to the basics of music input into notation software, and not having to spend endless hours on YouTube trying to figure out how to, in my example, add a measure, I feel that Dorico is lacking.
Today I spent three hours doing something I could have done easily in Sibelius in 15 minutes. My hope is that with time, Dorico will, at least provide an insightful manual with a truly solid index for finding at least basic operations in such a huge manual. Until then, I just can’t endorse the product. As someone who can be on very tight schedules with film scoring projects and arranging work, I just don’t have time to spare. A great manual with a great index would fix all of that. Will they make that happen? I hope so. Thanks again, everyone.
I’m not taking sides here, but just to be accurate, did it take you 3 hours to DO it, or three hours to DISCOVER HOW to do it? (I’m assuming you already knew how to do it in Sibelius).
In the long term, there’s a big difference between those two things - You only have to do the learning part of the task once.
Intriguing. There appears to be an oversight in the index at the back of the Dorico manual (under Bars, not Measures - Dorico’s developed by people in the U.K. where “bars” is the common term. FWIW the Sibelius manual doesn’t deal with “measures” either, apart from telling you to look under “bars”). On the other hand, if you search the Dorico online manual for “add bars” (no quotes required) then you get the best result at the very top of the list.
May I suggest you bookmark the online manual? By the sounds of things it’ll save you many hours in future.
Wow! I caught the end of this thread, went to the beginning expecting it to be from three years ago… I have a soft spot for Lilypond - remarkable software in its way - but can’t imagine using it for a paid job. If you haven’t ‘got’ Dorico yet, keep on keeping on. I didn’t find it ‘intuitive’ to learn (whatever that means), but work in it is now 50%+ quicker than in Finale. i.e. Jobs that I quote two weeks or six months for are finishing quite a bit early. This is mostly due to flow organisation and Dorico’s engraving rules which allow predictable adjustments en masse, but also things like cues and Dorico’s handling of percussion are way past anything else.
There is now a “user friendly” version of Lilypond. It’s called Musescore, though a lot of the low-level stuff that was “open heart score surgery” in Lilypond has been hidden under the user-friendliness blanket
If you go back to Daniel’s early blog posts on Dorico design, “Program C” was Lilypond. I think it has actually had quite an influence on the basic design of Dorico - for example you can organize a Lilypond project around the ideas of “players” “flows” and “layouts” if you want, though the are not called by those names, and there are other possible ways to organize a big Lilypond project, while in Dorico players, flows, and layouts are for all practical purposes “the only way”.
Lilypond does seem to have lost its way a bit since the last “released version” came out 4 or 5 years ago. They have gone down the rabbit hole of trying to tidy up the “untamed jungle” of the input syntax to earlier versions - I’m not sure how benefits from that, long-standing users know their way around the jungle already, and potential new users still don’t have a built-in GUI. But open source projects either go where the most active members feel like going or don’t go anywhere, so the “next version” will be whatever it will be, when it finally arrives.
Ah… I didn’t know that Musescore was related to Lilypond. I’ve had students who use Musescore due to it’s price. I’ve only used it to edit a couple of things, but again I would hate to have to work in it.
I don’t think there is any shared lineage between LilyPond and MuseScore, except that MuseScore uses the same Emmentaler music font by default. MuseScore grew out of the Muse sequencer project by Werner Schweer, while LilyPond started out as an attempt to extend TeX for music notation by Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.
And this should surprise no one. Dorico could be the “perfect” notation program, thoroughly answering every possible user objection, and many users still would not switch.
And who could blame them? When you’re scrambling from one deadline to the next, you’re more likely to put up with familiar annoyances and quirks and workarounds. In their mind (probably), “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
Happily, professionals are slowly switching over as Dorico matures (and as they’re evangelized by their colleagues). Some never will, and that’s fine. We music engravers live in an age of abundance.
I started off with Dorico doing real live jobs in it, but then redoing them from scratch in Finale for delivery. I got to the point where I knew enough not to redo them much sooner than I expected.
Musescore is certainly a rewrite, in different computer languages, but I got the impression its creators had looked at the source code of Lilypond in detail, even though they didn’t copy it verbatim.
As for fonts, they both now have Bravura as an option, if not as the default. Musescore used to have the strange combination of the GUI in Bravura, but the score in Emmentaler by default!
Dan, I had the same thought. For someone on a tight, high budget project they aren’t likely to make the switch because the potential for disaster would be too high. They likely wouldn’t have time to really become proficient excepting trial by fire, which isn’t worth it unless your REALLY unhappy with your program. I’d also guess that many professionals have a whole suite of custom macros to do those things that are most important and labor intensive (especially finale users), which means that they can work fast, warts and all.
Ironically, I find Dorico to be rather intuitive from the get go. It felt like a breath of fresh air to me as soon as I started using it. (Then again, I also liked the introduction of the Sibelius banner, but I digress…) I admit that it was a touch cumbersome until I memorized the primary key commands for pop ups and remembered where the important (to me) notation and engraving settings were. Once that was done though, it was easy for me. I’m a bit baffled why it confuses others… each major mode seems rather self-explanatory. The only thing that is really different is the divide between write and engrave modes (and that setup is a tab rather than a dialogue). That said, I understand and appreciate it, even if it is an extra click for other things. I know I definitely moved things accidentally in Sibelius and that doesn’t happen here.
EDIT: I should also mention that I had followed the development diary closely, so I had an idea of what I was getting into before taking the plunge.
I guess it comes down to the fact that people think and approach things differently and therefore cope with challenges differently. Some people have a technical mind and like to do everything from the command line, other people are of the visual type and like to have a direct replication of real-world interfaces (i. e. pen and paper). You can’t please everyone and you shouldn’t, anyway. There’ll always be the person that’s unsatisfied and prefers an alternative (if there is one). So be it.
Daniel is correct. Musescore really hasn’t any ties to LilyPond outside of Emmentaler. While it’s possible Werner looked at the internals of LP to get ideas for MS, it’s a fundamentally different approach that relies on completely different algorithms and user interfaces. It came about in its own way, so there’s no “re-write” in its relation to LP.
I’m glad that some find Dorico intuitive - I don’t, and find the term a little problematic: is there something wrong with me if don’t find it intuitive? But then I didn’t find Finale intuitive (used it for 6 years), nor Sibelius (used it for 14 years). Each on had a learning curve, and I was/am happy with that. I love the output with Dorico, and as I use it more, it becomes faster. I am (still) more fluent with Sibelius, but that will change. We use what we use if it fits our needs. For me, Dorico does!
‘Intuitive’ is an over-used word in computer interface discussions. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you can just pile in and start using it without reading the manual, but rather that things are consistent, so that one things behaves like another, which leads to familiarity and ‘successful guessing’.
I’d say Dorico’s strength is the consistency of its interface, and it took me a much shorter time to master than Finale, which I’d say took me about fn years to master the UI and get the results I wanted.
Not to pile on with finale, but I recently downloaded the finale 30 day trial and gave up after only an hour. I used finale for a few years when I was in undergrad, so it’s been a few years. Even though I once was reasonably proficient to accomplish basic tasks and I’m relatively tech savvy, (AND considering the interface hasn’t changed one iota since I used it 7 years ago), I still couldn’t figure out how to do a damn thing. Menus hidden in menus which change on you depending on the tool pallet you’ve selected… not for me. My special project can wait. Much like the OP, it mystifies me that people use and enjoy Finale. My brain sure doesn’t. Like anything, I know living with it would yield results, but I do think the barrier for entry has to be lower with Dorico.
I don’t think I ‘enjoyed’ Finale until it got to the point that I could make it do anything with often crazy workarounds. I never enjoyed Sibelius because it seemed less hackable, so forced me sometimes to change what I wanted to what I could get. The only scoring software that I’ve ever been able to use without the manual was Igor Engraver. You could consistently move anything anywhere and anything you tried to do, worked exactly as expected. (for me…) Unfortunately it required pen-testing level workarounds to use it without crashing it. I’ve definitely got to the point where I enjoy Dorico, especially with the Streamdeck software. It has the consistency of being designed and built from the ground up.
May I enter this discussion…Dorico has an incredible features. Changing all the written music for example from 4/4 meter to 7/16 never has been easier. Any way editing a written music makes me feel uncertain what a result I can expect after I add just a single bar.
What do I do, if I would like to insert a blank 5/8 bar between existing 3/4 and 4/4 without changing any bars starting with a mentioned 4/4 ? Or how do I expand a bar of 3/4 till 4/4 without changing all written music after this bar?