Praise for Dorico 5 Pro

Dorico
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It seems that since I rejoined activity on this forum, is that all I’ve done is whinge about bugs or potential bugs. Sorry if that makes me appear negative: far from it, I have very high expectations about the latest release of this lovely software.

SO, for example, I loaded one of my own ancient MIDI files (written in Encore, remember that older folks? Back in the early 1990s), of a movement from a Bach Trio Sonata. It’s one of my simpler, “let’s see how this gets transcribed” challenge demos I try out on all notation-based software.

What can I say? Beautifully spaced, accurate notation, the BEST bit, (almost) the perfect enharmonic spelling of accidentals. I think I needed to change just ONE in the first 5 pages. Compared to Finale 2005 (oops, sorry to mention it!), but which was the last version I liked long enough to keep, this was genius work, folks.

Then (apart from my Trill issue, mentioned elsewhere hereabouts), the ease of adding ornamentation, dynamics, everything - and having it appear in the right place, with the score spacing instantly adjusted to fit it in. oh WOW! Half a second of work by Dorico, rather than me spending several minutes in a magnified view in Finale.

And - even compared with Dorico 4 Pro - the untouched playback! WOW, SO MUSICAL!

Once the “X.0.0” buglets are fixed in Dorico 5 Pro, I think I am going to fall in love with this software.

But folks, I will still report niggles and bugs. Just wanted to straighten the record, and say, for at least 95% of it, if not more - GREAT WORK! Thanks! :slight_smile:

[Edited PS: And especial thanks to both the Dorico Staffers, and others hereabouts, for your amazing speed of help and response! It’s all very much appreciated!!]

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Yeah I think the whinging (love that word) is only because it’s already so good, 99% of the time I’m literally reveling at how powerful, capable and easy to use this software is. Really there’s nothing like it anywhere else in any domain.

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Downloading xml’s is an excellent way to ease oneself into the software.

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Indeed so - but then again, I have a heap of scores written first in Encore (from the early 1990s), then Finale (from early 2000s), as well as random MIDI files created in numerous early DAWS and suchlike. And Finale 2005 can do (a bad) job of importing Encore 4 files, and exporting them as XML.

So one way or the other, I have a heap of material (many hundreds of show arrangements, original compositions, and more) to play with.

It will be interesting to see if it’s quicker to re-enter some of them from scratch, rather than attempt importing and debugging!

Either way, now that I have a brief “down-time” before my next project is due to commence, it’s gonna be fun. I hope!!!

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I have successfully imported 100’s of xml files into Dorico. Because xml is still not uniformly exported by other programmes you may need to adopt a variety of strategies.
Dorico is sometimes sensitive to malformed tuplets and you will end up with rests thereafter rather than notes. In that case return to the original, delete the offending tuplet and try again (add a text comment and it is easy to restore the missing notes later).

Other strategies might be to import into MuseScore/Sibelius first (because they have different sensitivities and differnt xml export capabilities). If you can use Sibelius, the Dolet plugin is far superior to Sibelius native xml export.

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Of course Dolet, and indeed MusicXML itself, is now owned by MakeMusic, the people behind Finale. Even my Finale 2005 system came with “Dolet Lite”, a then-independent add-on option. Further versions of Dolet came with Finale 2006 and 2007, both of which I bought, but neither of which I ended up using, as they caused serious issues on my then main PC, such as crashing during “Save As Audio”, and printing random musical entities in “white” (no ink!) for some bizarre reason - and actually I found the “new” XML libraries flaky compared with 2005.

FWIW, I downloaded Finale 25(?) to play with about 2 years ago, and was depressed to see how little had changed or improved in the 18 years since Finale 2005 …

… And that is when I decided to delve into Dorico!

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Likewise. My last version was finale 2012, I believe, and I couldn’t believe it when I tried it last year again (a full decade later) and everything was just as I’d left it… I wanted to check it out to potentially run the medieval plugin, but I just couldn’t convince myself it was all worth it.

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There was a period from c. 2006 to 2011 when Finale added several productive features, like Linked Parts, the Selection Tool, Expression Categories; and improvements to Chords, Lyrics and Staff … moving. But then they spent nearly a decade sorting out ‘technical debt’, and moving to Unicode, 64-bit, etc. (Yet they’re still on VST2, and still with the active frame limit of 32,767 frames…)

The demonstrations of Dorico version 1, even with all its limitations, were a revelation, in terms of all the things you didn’t have to do.

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