Hello!
I have a few questions about what to expect of Dorico 4.
Will we see a better integration with DAWs?
My desired workflow is to be able to work with Dorico and the DAW at the same time. I prefer Dorico to any DAW if I have to write music, but DAWs work better with synth and unconventional instruments (glissandi patches, etc). I wish I could work with both worlds together in order to get the results I want. I don’t need Dorico to be integrated within Cubase, just to be able to sync it (tempo and measures) for allowing a better drag and drop of the MIDI info. Also, the ability to drop the MIDI of Dorico inside of Cubase (or any DAW) WITHOUT any CC.
Will we see custom templates and custom instrumets in Dorico 4?
This will be awesome to use some of the unconventional instruments mentioned above, as well to create our own composing templates. I wish I could have a DRAFT one with visibilities like in a DAW, as I like to write music from the DRAFT to the real orchestration. I think we’ll see audio tracks. Also adding several instruments at the same time or without closing the window for adding instruments will be appreciated
Will we see the new license management?
This may be a embargoed question, but a dongle-free management will be very agreeable. I mean, I’m planning on buying a laptop and I wish I could carry my Dorico in it without the fear of losing/breaking the eLicenser. I don’t mind the eLicenser in my desktop, but the laptop is another story.
I don’t know what you think, but I’m really looking forward to seeing Dorico 4. I can’t wait!
Allow me to let you down gently: the next major version of Dorico will not include any direct integration features with Cubase, and I’m afraid that includes transport sync. We are actively working on ways to bring the two applications closer together, but these are long-term projects that will take a while to come to fruition. You can, however, expect improvements to bringing material into Dorico from Cubase and other sequencers, and for the MIDI editing interface in Play mode to be smoother and better.
We cannot say for sure at this point whether you will be able to define your own instrument types in the next major version of Dorico. We certainly want to bring this feature to the software, but it is a really significant piece of work since Dorico’s representation of instruments is so rich, and we need to be able to incorporate not only the basic things like number of staves, number of staff lines, clef, transposition, etc., but also things like number of strings and their tunings for fretted instruments, complex percussion setup, and so on.
As for license management, we are indeed hard at work on the new license management system, but we cannot yet say which will be the first products released to make use of the new system. We plan to provide more information about the transition from eLicenser to the new license management system in good time before the arrival of the first products that use it, so that users will have information about what to expect.
Thank you for the quick answer!
Of course we users dream about things, and you slowly but without pause make our dreams come true. I’m very happy about how Dorico works and the things that it allows me to do. It reflects positively in the music I write (like the ars nova notation “inventions” to their music back in the good old days :P) .
About this:
You can, however, expect improvements to bringing material into Dorico from Cubase and other sequencers, and for the MIDI editing interface in Play mode to be smoother and better.
I have to admit that I prefer working the other way around. I write the music on paper and Dorico and then I bring it to Cubase. Yes, I know it’s not the common thing in this modern world we live in, but I feel that I belong to the score, not to the pianoroll. I don’t know if that makes sense.
And again, thank you for the ultra quick answer, I’m still looking forward to seeing where you bring us with the new Dorico release.
In addition to the DAW/Notation convergence mentioned above, I think there is need for major improvements on “the other end” of the process (so to speak) which is the exchange, import, export of notation. I know there are major shortcomings in the definition and interpretation of MusicXML. The upshot is that every time I try to use that, particularly in importing music from scanning programs, I end up with an impossible mess. When music is originally entered in Dorico, Finale, or MuseScore, MusicXML actually works pretty well.
But when trying to use it with scanners (photoscore et al) or PDFToMusic, it is usually quite a mess. SOMETIMES, I get better results by first running the XML file through MuseScore or Finale, then exporting to XML again, which becomes more coherent to Dorico.
Two things are clear to me:
Dorico is relatively weak compared to Finale and MuseScore in the XML area,
The big problems are beyond any single vendor or product and really beg for more industry cooperation.
As you hint, the XML coming from scanning OCR apps can be quite poor, because they’ve failed to interpret the music correctly, e.g. just crammed a bar with extra notes when they should be tuplets.
Other notation apps may be more forgiving or accommodating in their reading of such XML, but you’re right that it’s not necessarily something that Dorico can/should fix.
Like you, I’ve found imports from Finale to work very well into Dorico.
I realize it is a difficult challenge that is easy to under-estimate (like self-driving cars). But there have been many cases where the scanning program is able to playback its interpretation of what it recognized, with pretty good results, but when sending that to notation programs via XML, it can be a disaster.
I have seen many cases where the scanning program is able to show and play the music as if there are 4 beats in a measure, but when it gets to Dorico (or one of the other notation programs) there are extra beats.
Basically any piece of music I try to process will produce some of these errors. It seems to me that all vendors would benefit from having the process work better end-to-end.
