Hello the Dorico community. Sorry if my English is not perfect as it is not my native language.
One year ago I was switching from Sibelius to Dorico.
A year after and after an intensive work on 25 orchestral scores, I just want to share my experience.
I can say I’m very satisfied with Dorico, especially since the 2.0 version.
As orchestrator and arranger for grade 3-4 concert bands and other orchestras, Dorico has changed my life and boosted my workflow and my productivity.
In my experience, the most important improvements from my previous software are :
- the flexibility of the edition features. It is incredibily fast to modifiy music, explode, select a voice and send to another instrument, enter dynamics… Popovers are definitively a very fast way to enter musical elements.
- the engrave quality. All is immediatly perfect, beautifull and printable without any manual adjustment (except for page breaks)
- the way of managing multi instrument for one musician
- the percussion management, which is a very huge improvement.
- the play mode. I mostly use it to adjust tempo and generate audio for the musicians. I’im using Noteperformer, playback and I’m very satisfied with the playback quality.
In addition, Dorico is very stable (I experience very few crashes), especially as we consider it is a young software.
However, I’ve sometimes experienced some slowdown issues.
My wishes for the future are by priority:
- transposed parts set. In wind band music we need different transposition for a part (C, Bb Euphium in G of F clef)
- condensed staves (this has been discussed many times on this forum)
- automatic page breaks optimization. I wish to have a function which optimizes the staff size and the page breaks to avoid pages with very few staves. This would save me a lot of time (and paper…)
- a smarter explode function when working with a mix of voices and chords (useful to explode piano scores). I’ve ever posted on this subject
- an improvement with copy paste from cross staves to single staves
- a better import of multi-measures rests from XML parts (from photoscore, it is a pain, we need to recreate all measure rests, I still need to use my old software for that)
- an option to automaticaly propagate the main score properties to parts (I often forget to propagate before printing my parts)
- a “housing styles” and model manager
- playable glissandi (especially for harps) and fermatas.
- a simplify alteration feature
- A line editor for modern notation
- A more flexible licence management for 2 computers (I’ve been obliged to buy 2 licences to work confortably with my 2 computers)
Many thanks to the developpment Team wich make a very great job with Docico.
I hope my wishes to be in a future version of Dorico.