I’ve been using Sibelius for 20 years, but am finally thinking of making the jump to Dorico. The only thing stopping me (apart from idleness) is that I cannot work out how I would replace my current workflow for when I have a live recording to integrate into an orchestral accompaniment using Dorico.
At the moment I work like this -
prepare a rough accompaniment / click track in Sibelius to get the tempo I want
record the live performers - typically voice(s) - with the accompaniment on headphones for synching
set up a Reaper project with one channel for the live recording and Sibelius in Rewire mode
complete and fine-tune the accompaniment in Sibelius (using VSL)
save a WAV from Reaper
Or sometimes the live performance comes first:
record live player(s)
create a tempo track using Sonic Visualiser
import into Reaper
proceed as above
It’s really important to me that I can hear the live performance while I adjust the Sibelius score. I don’t want to have to keep exporting a WAV file and then importing into a sequencer just in order to hear the accompaniment and live players together.
But as far as I’ve been able to see from reading this forum, there is no way of doing anything like that in Dorico - no Rewire, no audio tracks in Dorico itself.
I must have missed something. Can anyone suggest a Dorico-based workflow which would achieve this?
(Also slightly hesitant about the fact that it seems I would have to switch to the VSL Synchron libraries - I tried those and I far prefer the original VI libraries. But I could live with this if the above can be solved.)
If you search the forum you’ll find lots of discussion of this plug-in and how it can be used to sync the transport with e.g. Cubase or another host.
As for using Vienna Instruments, you can use any VST instrument with Dorico. The people at VSL have put together Dorico playback templates etc. for the Synchron libraries, but if you’re willing to do a bit of setup yourself, or throw yourself on the mercy of your fellow users (some of whom will no doubt be using the same instruments and may be willing to share elements of their own setups), there’s nothing to stop you from using these instruments with Dorico.
If you’d like to work with an existing, synced audio track from your DAW in Dorico Pro my workflow is the following:
I create an initial mockup using virtual instruments in my DAW of choice (which in my case is Logic Pro)
I bounce from Logic whatever I’d like to hear in Dorico as an audio file
I also export from my Logic session the MIDI that I plan to convert into music notation in Dorico (which also functions as the exporting of a tempo map)
I attach the bounced audio file to a static video using a program like iMovie or Final Cut Pro and export the resulting video
I import into Dorico the MIDI I exported from Logic that will serve as the basis for my notation
in Dorico I then attach the video I created in iMovie or FCP, using Dorico’s Setup Mode (right click on the flow along the bottom for your score and choose “attach video”)
The end result is that I can have the audio from my DAW perfectly synced with the corresponding MIDI and resulting score in Dorico, controlling the audio using the “video” fader in the Dorico mixer (in case this is helpful).
Best -
One person who used such a system (to import a processed EmVoice audio) had the “blank” video file display the timecode, which I thought a pretty clever way in case synchronizing was ever important.
just on this – like many I have switched to Synchron and have created my own maps for this. However, if you prefer VI then it might be worth considering the Articulate presets from Symphonic Riot which allows easy integration into Dorico. https://www.articulate-preset.com/articulate-map. There have been a number of discussions on this on the forum if you want to search further.