Hello all,
First post here, nice to read through the commments and see already a thriving group of users willing to help (and responsive staff from Steinberg as well, very gratifying)
I’ve been testing out Dorico since it came out, thanks to the many 30-day trial periods. At first, I just didn’t get it… I’ve been a Finale user for so long that I’m accustomed to my habits there. Then, at first there were missing features.
Now, finally, with V2.x (and especially the latest major update) I decided to pull the trigger and take advantage of the cross grade offer. The new features in Play, support for user-created maps for VST as well as the inclusion of beta support for Noteperformer really convinced me… (Noteperformer is the sole reason I keep Sibelius 7.5, and I was concerned that someday that would no longer be viable)
I pick up software conventions pretty fast - and usually can figure out notation software even faster (there’s only so many logical ways to do stuff). Having used Finale, Sibelius, Notion and Overture already, I’d have to say that once I got my head around the slightly different concepts, I found Dorico very easy to learn, and was able to get to a pretty good speed entering notes with the MIDI keyboard in a matter of about an hour or so. One thing I really found refreshing was the speed with which I could add slurs, articulations, dynamics, etc… I can see how with very little work I could surpass my speed in Finale for most basic note entry (and even eventually the more complex scores, too).
As a test, I downloaded a Public Domain score of a wind trio by Siegfrid Karg-Elert from IMSLP, and scored the first movement…
This is the resulting render using Noteperformer, the only tweaking I did after notation was adjusting note lengths in Play at the caesura, as well as adding in some tempo tweaking at that point. (Do note the .wav has been compressed to .rar, you’ll need a RAR utility to extract it)
One thing I’ve already noticed about Notperformer, is that it apparently doesn’t like pickup notes when rendering - I’ve taken to simply adding in the rests or an empty measure at the beginning, and that seems to fix it.
If anyone would like to see the .dorico file and test it with Noteperformer, let me know and I’ll attach it to a reply (I’m away from the studio right now)
Best to all,
