Being one of the many who came from Finale since it’s end, I thought I would post a list of things I like after almost a month of using Dorico. Granted, my work is fairly basic most of the time (hymns and simple choral stuff), so I may not be a fair judge. Nevertheless, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’ve never been so excited about typesetting as I’ve been in the last few weeks.
Understandably, it can be rough for long-time Finale users, especially any that aren’t particularly fluent with computers and put in a lot of effort over the years to learn a program, not because they had any interest in software, but because they needed it to support their music interests.
Still, that doesn’t justify some of the nasty posts that have been appearing from frustrated Finale users. A company typically doesn’t make the decision to shut down and send its customers to the competition without a fair bit of thought beforehand, and to write posts implying that Dorico is a hopeless mess that cannot possibly be useful to anyone seems like quite a slam to the Finale team’s reasoning abilities.
I’ve been very impressed with the Dorico community’s generous support as we Finale user’s flood the forum with questions, which obviously are necessary in this transition stage. The Dorico team especially does a great job at staying professional, courteous, and helpful no matter what gets thrown at them.
Once again, I will take the opportunity to highlight the extremely helpful Dorico First Steps tutorial. Please, before posting a rant about how unintuitive and incapable Dorico is, work your way through this exercise and then come here and ask for help with the questions that remain at that point.
So, in an attempt to put some weight on the positive side of the scale, here’s a list of things I like about Dorico. I put them down as I thought of them, so they are not in any particular order, nor am I saying that they are exclusive to Dorico and unavailable or inferior in other typesetting programs. Just a list of things that stand out to me as being very well done in Dorico.
- The beautiful, modern-looking user interface
- The ultra-intelligent automatic layout, limiting the need for manual adjustment and overrides.
- The Layouts feature
- The extremely well-thought-through assignments of keyboard shortcuts.
- Particularly, the double tap on numbers for dotted notes. So quick.
- The popovers concept, with their easy-to-remember shortcuts and very intuitive content entry. (3/4, Eb, q=120, etc. etc.)
- The hundreds of settings, with clear, well-illustrated explanations. (Ok, I know this is a two-edged sword, as functionality and options can make a program overwhelming. But given a choice, I’d any day rather have options there for every scenario than have the short-lived bliss of being able to master the program in 2 hours.)
- The workflow separation made with the five modes. (I know not everyone appreciates this, but I have found it very logical and efficient.)
- The comprehensive options for filtering selections. (The ease of selecting everything on the page, then filtering for lyrics, notes and chords, and even specific verses or specific notes in chords, etc. is something one cannot help appreciating.)
- And, along with the previous point, the excellent copy and paste functionality. (Pasting lyrics from one staff into another or from a third party text editor, as well as control-clicking, then using the alt shortcut to duplicate it elsewhere, etc.)
- The ease of working with multiple voices in a staff, and particularly the “Remove rests” feature.
- The extensive playback options.
- The ability to easily flip a project between different note styles. (In my work, shaped notes to round and vice versa. You want shaped notes? Ctrl-Shift-E > Notes > click. Here you go!)
Thanks, Dorico!
