Rise of a Dorico Community Library?

Dorico
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With every credit to the work that Dan put into Scorico, that door is now closed as far as the ability resurrect or build directly upon it. Bummer! But I choose to think of that as an opportunity to maybe rethink the possibilities. :slight_smile:

I’ve no idea how many are familiar with Disco Services ( https://www.disco.ac ) and the capabilities of Disco libraries in particular, so here’s a short description:

1. Essentially, the owner creates an "inbox" for the library and authorizes users to upload (In our case) Dorico scores, demo audio, PDF, expression maps, etc.  

    1.1 Users are given a link to drag/drop files to the inbox and add certain other information.

        1.1.1 For the ambitious, there is a free "bulk uploader" you can install on your machine to streamline the process.

        1.1.2 Any Existing Disco account holders (this is not required) can "cross-link" files from their own private account to the inbox for inclusion in the library.
        
    1.2 The user is allowed to request that the files go on a certain "playlist" within the library.

        1.2.1 These allow a contributor to have their own sub-page within the larger library. Say for example an educator wishes to have a page/playlist that correspond to a certain course, or project.

        1.2.2 With appropriate permissions, a playlist can contain works from other contributors - as say the educator wants their students to review certain other scores or material from within the library.

        1.2.3 A playlist may have its own images and information including contact information. 

        1.2.4 Each playlist gets its own direct link, which the contributor may distribute to students, etc. 

    1.3 An AI driven module automatically categories and creates search tags for files in the inbox. Tags are also read from audio metadata. Thumbnails are created for PDF's, etc.

    1.4 The owner (or other designated "team members") manually reviews the tagged files in the inbox and put them in the library as appropriate.

2. The library is searchable by the obvious like title, composer, contributor, etc. but also a wide variety of AI generated or contributor tags such as words from the lyrics, lyrical theme, key, tempo, instrumentation, file type, ... 

3.  Anyone can view the content (if it is viewable in a browser like PDF's) or listen to any audio. Downloading depends on the library settings:

    Authenticated users (you do not have to be a Disco account holder) can download material from libraries that have a "public" setting. 

    As you might expect, users cannot download material from libraries that have a "private" setting unless the contributor gives them a private download link - another use for putting contact info on a playlist I suppose.

Whew, sorry about that. Essentially I’m toying with the idea of creating such a library under my existing Disco account. Since we can’t say Dorico Community Library, Let’s call it Ludovico (Dorico’s brother) just for the sake of this discussion. :slight_smile: Actual Name/URL is TBD.

I though maybe the subpage/playlist feature might increase the value to some, as well as the use of the “private” setting to let contributors control their downloads (or refer users to their own private Disco account if they have one).

Costwise and goalwise, I’m pretty much where Dan was with Scorico. Ballpark, It will cost me about $120 per year per thousand files. I’m thinking I’d just eat that for the first 1000 or so. (Be nice to have the problem of outgrowing that) No direct score selling. No charge or donation just to put some files in the public library.

If you want to have your own page/playlist within the library, I’m toying with the idea of some nominal fee ($1 per year?) to offset the cost of things a bit and provide a way forward for more files if that becomes a concern.

Since I’m the one who has to pay per file, I’d reserve the right to do some culling occasionally to keep costs down and quality up, but having your own page/sublist would protect you from that.

And if you want FULL control, have publishing or privacy concerns, etc. then have your own Disco Account and link what you want to the public library. Give me a referral if you sign up, and I may get a few credits from Disco to save a little bit.

On the subject of licensing and publishing - I’m thinking of the difference of what publishing means for ownership of a work, versus a specific written version of a score, versus audio, etc.

The easy one is that ownership of a musical work is never transferred, so the work itself doesn’t have to be considered creative commons. You WOULD have to grant a non-exclusive license to the library to stream your uploaded audio without royalties. And a creative commons license for any Dorcio File, expression map, etc. that is downloadable from the public library. If exclusivity is a problem, you might upload a score reduction or something that would considered a different ISMN/printed work maybe?

I might have just wasted a lot of time thinking and typing, sigh. Thoughts? Useful?

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I certainly would be interested in a central place to share expression maps, percussion kits & maps, scripts, doricolib files and other types of Dorico xml files. It’s not advertised or encouraged, but there really is a lot of customization that can be done with doricolib files.

Just today in fact, I had gotten tired of editing modal chord names as there’s no way to show the full name without editing it, so I made a doricolib file to always show the full name when “do not append period” is selected, and to show the regular abbreviated name when “append period” is selected. I have doricolib files for a bunch of other types of chord symbol alterations, additional clefs, additional page sizes, a Jazz score order, 0-line instruments, etc. I have doricolib files that load all my page templates by default in a New project, and a custom gradients file. I’ve kinda gotten to the point that instead of hoping for a feature request to be granted, I’ll just see if I can hack it myself with a doricolib file first.

I assume there are others that have come up with other creative doricolib file uses, and I’m sure there are plenty of users that make much better use of scripts than I do. I’m honestly probably less likely to use the community library site for posting or perusing music, but definitely would be interested in some sort of site where we could share and exchange he above type of files and modifications.

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Well I have to ask the question, why did Scorico fail/close? Was it due to lack of interest from the community? Nobody wanted to take over the running and development of it.

I wanted to develop such a site but Dan was adamant that he wanted to do it himself. Fair enough. And a mighty fine effort was the result. So I have been not considering this since then, but now it seems to have come up again.

Maybe a poll of some sort would be useful - research the market before developing. :slight_smile:

Discourse can support polls but Steinberg may not have enabled that.

I’m not convinced Disco is the right platform for the sort of things Dorico users would share, such as expression maps and so on. But let’s hear if people do really want such a thing.

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Scorico failed because I think I went about it wrong. I was shooting for something that could eventually be big, akin to Musescore.com, but I just didn’t have the time and money to scale it to the point that it was profitable. With time and money, I think it could have grown to the point that it was sustainable.

I’d still like to see something happen. The question is how it is supported financially, and how it is moderated in regards to content. Perhaps something a little more humble in its aspirations, and something that can grow a bit more organically.

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My approach would have been to use an open source digital asset management platform (DAM). I’d still be prepared to look into developing this. The only thing is that the cost of a server at about $30-40 a month would have to be supported by ongoing donation. My time and effort would be at no cost. And also, I’d have to see interest from say 100 users to make it worthwhile. Without a poll, it’s hard to know how many people would use this.

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