My (limited) understanding is that once you contact that reseller, with your Steinberg ‘software’ issue/concern, if they can’t help directly they should pass all the detail on expressly to Steinberg support in Germany (on your behalf, as it were). Contact will be established with you from there; sounds a little convoluted, but gives resellers in the field a chance to offer some advice/help etc., and also for Steinberg to log the stats for support calls, in that area/region.
Armed with that data and if figures showed undue growth (for whatever reason), they might consider opening a dedicated support operation, for that region/product, etc…
This might be what you are missing. The right arrow moves the caret forward by the rhythmic grid, but the space bar moves the caret forward by the duration selected. To move the caret forward by a dotted quarter press 6 twice (the second press makes it a dotted note) then space bar. Much quicker than using Alt–[ or ]. I was a Finale user from around 1990, converted to Dorico in 2019, and once I was used to duration before pitch I reckon I was just as fast entering notes this way compared to Speedy Entry — if not faster.
That really only applies if you’ve committed to Duration before Pitch, though. If you’re in pitch before duration, hitting 6 twice is going to input a pitched dotted quarter, with whatever pitch was previously typed/played.
It really depends if you are using Dorico for composition IMO. If you are composing directly into Dorico with a MIDI keyboard, then you have to leave the input caret every time you want to figure out a line, voicing, etc., otherwise Dorico will obviously input whatever you are playing. Then after you know what you want, you have to re-enter the bar to resume input. That’s a ton of wasted time over the course of a project, not to mention all the times you might forget and then have bars of nonsense to delete. (Speaking from experience as Dorico did not have pitch-first as an option back when I started with it.) With pitch-first, I can simply input, figure out what I want on my MIDI keyboard, then immediately resume input all without leaving the input caret. It’s simply way faster if I can avoid leaving the input caret and restarting a few thousand times while writing.
I’ll grant that if you are just inputting an existent score, then there’s a slight speed advantage to duration-first, but honestly that that much. 30 years of pitch-first input has me hitting the pitch and the duration just milliseconds apart. Finale had a duration-first Speedy option too, just Speedy with the Caps Lock on, but I certainly never used it unless I was inputting an exercise of all eighth notes or something.
All very true. For myself, coming from 30+ years with Finale (and almost as many with Sibelius) once I committed to Dorico I stuck to working the ‘Dorico way’ rather than trying to make it work like Finale. For noodling to work out a line or voicing I am quite happy to flick back and forth between pitch or duration first using K — you don’t need to exit and re-enter note entry. I am sure there as many ways of working as there are users. That’s once of Dorico’s best features, it is very flexible. Just takes a while to learn what it can do. Five years in and I am still occasionally digging through the manual, watching videos, and searching here on the forum. But I enjoy using it much more than I ever did Finale, or Sibelius.
Yeah, I just can’t work that way personally. When I’m focusing on composition I always forget which input method is selected and inevitably end up inputting a pile of nonsense, LOL!
I wish more Finale switchers would at least try a different way for a while, as in Dan’s suggestion #2 in post #3 of this thread. Insisting that nothing must change about your note input method makes you blind to the advantages. The Dorico team really did think hard about this design, and I find the default note entry method much more efficient than Speedy ever was for me, because of the many additional things you can do with it.
Another aspect of what I said in post #10 above: In Finale we got used to having to do everything ourselves, each time. Dorico offers many ways to streamline entry and editing over that approach. And of course it takes time to learn them.
When I used to enter notes in Finale, I often used Speedy Entry in duration before pitch mode using CapsLock, so the adjustment to entering notes in Dorico was easy for me. Sure, entering a series of notes with frequent rests in between takes slightly longer but navigating with the space bar and the arrow keys has become second nature.
One thing that used to take a lot of time was entering dotted notes. For the Finale users who haven’t discovered this yet: in Dorico you can enter a whole series of eighths, select them and press the period (.) key. In one go, the entire series is transformed into dotted eighths followed by 16ths. This is an enormous time-saver for me. I also like the double-press of a note value to create a dotted note. This does, of course, only work in duration-before-pitch. And for those who need to enter homophonic music on more than one staff, it’s really convenient in Dorico to be able to enter notes on many staves simultaneously.
Stick to it, Finale users! Many of us have gone that route and are glad we did.
I second this motion. As a Finale user for 32 years, I made a concerted effort to study and learn about Dorico when I switched two years ago. Early on I was frequently disoriented and made lots of “mistakes” rooted in Finale behaviors (like lots of manual positioning of systems ) — not in the sense of they didn’t manage to get me what I wanted, but because those mistakes ultimately wasted my time due to my own gaps in familiarity with Dorico. (This was especially true when trying to notate bigger pieces under deadlines.)
Those of us with the advantage of time and experience in learning Dorico certainly recognize that last week’s bomb-drop was cause for a kind of tension we didn’t have to live through. But, as @benwiggy pointed out early on, no one is really under the kind of do-it-NOW-or-never! pressure that the grief at Finale’s “passing” might inspire. It lingers on — as wraithware, to be sure, but functional — and there’s time for everyone to study Dorico from the ground up while exporting XMLs and even continuing to work in Finale on works with pressing deadlines.
More Thoughts on Using This Forum:
I would add — perhaps making few new friends in so doing, I realize — that it’s frankly also just kinda…well, rude to start demanding that software others have designed and developed for probably twelve years or more “should” do what any new user is already accustomed to in other software. It’s a bit like telling your hosts what dinner they should have prepared for you. (I use the analogy since, after all, Ben started this thread as a “Welcome!” I can already hear the “but this is different — I paid for this!” retorts. But I counter that consumerism doesn’t justify “demanderism.” If you decide (perhaps prematurely) that Dorico is unsatisfactory, you have other choices.)
I’ll also add that this forum is a truly special place filled with advice and wisdom, constructive debate and criticism when warranted, camaraderie, and even good humor. Those of us already here obviously have a connection to Dorico through our invested time and admiration for its functioning. But that doesn’t make us mindless shills. We regular users are just voluntarily pitching in to try and help each other and all of the new “Finale-refugee” members, and it should be self-evident that we won’t join in on the chorus when anyone starts singing variations on “this is terrible.”
I can’t speak to the Finale forum’s tone and how users there might have been acculturated, but I will say that I value being met here with respect, being incredibly supported, feeling welcome, looking forward to the responses and assistance I receive, and to giving back as I’m able.
I caution everyone new to the forum to be very mindful of not squandering the good will with which you will be met if you make some effort and a few simple gestures. “I tried looking for X, and haven’t found a way to do it; how does that work in Dorico?” will go a long way to guaranteeing that you get the help and answers you need.
ADDENDUM
Adopting a “we all work here” stance, I’d also like to share some thoughts on best practices for using the forum. (Full disclosure: I’m “just” a fellow user; I’ve learned these through being a member and observing the culture of the forum.)
Please:
Search the forum and manual before posting if your question is focused; and please watch Dorico’s videos first as necessary if you have a broader question (such as “how do I enter notes?”).
Search for an existing thread with your question already in it to avoid unnecessary duplication across threads, which only diffuses members’ efforts to respond and runs the risk of causing our eyes to glaze over and miss things while scrolling the forum if we see post after post that are essentially the same.
In cases where’s there’s a clear solution (as opposed to threads that are more discussion-oriented), mark the so that the solution is shown at the top of the thread below the OP. That saves anyone else searching a lot of reading time. (It’s also a nice gesture to “share the love” with someone who helped, of course.)
If a new thread is warranted, give it a clear and precise title. Something like “What’s Going On???” doesn’t tell the rest of us anything and requires us to click in to read it (or impels us to ignore it and keep scrolling…).
Include pertinent details (OS/platform; forum tags identifying Dorico version and/or topic-area of post). It’s frustrating for each of us to, say, spend time reading a thread only to from from the OP-er in the seventh post that it’s about a version we’re not really in a position to help with.
Once the initial Discourse limits on posting are removed, if you have a question that warrants detailed investigation, upload a copy of your file (following the procedure below) and/or — if images alone are truly sufficient to explain your problem/question — a screenshot(s) that will help everyone else know what problem you’re facing.
I made the switch from Finale (after nearly 20 years) to Dorico in 2020 and just wanted to weigh in regarding the learning curve: At first, I thought changing from Finale to Dorico can’t be so hard because it’s just another notation software. I quickly became frustrated because I couldn’t perform simple operations I could blindly perform in Finale.
After accepting that the whole UX concept is quite different, I started over and browsed through the whole manual in order to learn (and make notes about) the quickest ways of working with the aspects of the software I needed most.
The thing that hunted me for the longest time was the “shifted” number keys for the note duration, but it was just a matter of time.
Now I couldn’t be happier because for my requirements (mostly working on musical theatre scores), so many things are so much easier than they were in Finale.
My greatest challenge (before there even was a manual) was to remember where the commands were: the Write Menu, the Engrave Menu, Notation Options, Layout Options, Preferences, the Edit Menu, a Context Menu.
And of course now we can find all the commands with the Jump Bar. (But it still pays to get to know those menus.)
And I did not change the number keys for durations. I had the quarter note on (central) 5 in Finale, (mnemonic) 4 in Sibelius, and now (useful) 6 in Dorico. It took me a couple of days working in the program to get fully used to them. But I found that I wasn’t hitting the wrong durations – only that for a while I needed an extra moment to remember what key to use.
Now I still switch back & forth with Sibelius occasionally, and even keeping two sets of keyboard shortcuts in mind (and under my fingers) is possible over time …
Mark, I also did not change Dorico’s number keys for duration. Instead I use the number keys in the top row of the keyboard for note input in Dorico (whilst I had used the number key pad for Sibelius for more than 20 years…).
It feels extremely ergonomic, as I can also use my left thumb to hit the space bar for advancing, “generating rests”. Right hand is being virtuosic on the midi keyboard.
I have been using Finale for Windows, with varying degrees of ‘intensity’, for about 20 years, so I admit that am very used to the Finale way of doing things, without being totally blind to its defects. Reading through this topic and the introductory documentation, I can see that, for those who use the software to compose music, Dorico may well be at least as good as, and arguably in many ways better than Finale. My use of the software is very different, and I haven’t seen any mention of my sort of workflow, which worries me!
I am a choral singer and technical resource for my choir director, and I (currently) use Finale to ‘rearrange’ existing scores to make them more readable for myself and my fellow choristers, and to generate practice MP3s (with each of the voice parts banged out and the remainder as Aahs) for the more difficult works. Modern choral music - especially church music - frequently seems to be laid out with little or no thought for the people who are going to sing it. Problems can be as simple as two-page scores being on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper, through poor page turns and multiple asynchronous lines shoe-horned into a regular double SATB stave.
My current workflow consists of scanning (if I don’t have it as a PDF) and recognizing the score with SmartScore, saving it as MusicXML, then importing the MusicXML file into Finale and doing what needs doing to it there before printing it out from Finale. The cleanup generally involves some correction of incorrectly recognized notes, but about 50% of the work is around the text - either ‘unrolling’ multiple verses for easier sight-reading, or generating separate staves where the original score has multiple asynchronous voices on a single staff. I make a fair bit of use of Finale’s ‘explode music’ functionality. I usually cut and paste all the recognized text to a text editor to clean it up, and then re-enter it in the ‘fixed’ music.
The first substantial problem I have encountered with Dorico is the apparent lack of a true equivalent to Finale’s ‘Scroll View’ in its Write mode. For choral music with multiple verses located between the upper and lower staves (which is about 50% of my ‘workload’), I can find no way of pulling the lower staff down so that the lyrics of verses after the second are not on top of it, making it extremely difficult to work on the music on that staff. I suppose that I could move the lyrics of all the verses except the first to my text editor before starting to work on the music, but this introduces other problems (e.g. putting in appropriate markings in the music where the syllable structure differs from verse to verse).
Is anyone using Dorico in the way I use Finale, and, if so, can (s)he give me some pointers to the ‘Dorico way’ of accomplishing what I am currently doing with Finale?
Of course, it makes the grand-staff spacing the same, and eventually you’d want to move to more reasonable gaps in Page View and/or Engrave Mode, but it could make your “scrolling” life easier.
Thanks! That works, and there are various ways of selecting the specific staff spacings to be affected! I have to get my head around where Dorico puts things. It is a situation where Finale’s way of doing things (use the Staff tool to pull the lower staff down) seems a lot more natural. I don’t see a way, however, of making the increased spacing apply only to the voice staves, where I need it, and not to the accompaniment staves, where I don’t. Both are (respectively) grouped.
Indeed, though I always remind myself: none of this is “natural.” Scratching blobs on paper with quill and ink; banging sheets of metal plate; using software…it’s all artificial in the best sense. And as for software use itself, “natural” is, after all, simply what we’re accustomed to.
I also don’t know how to have individually customizable gaps in Galley View., or if it’s even possible. (Fellow Doricians with great wisdom…??) But remember, Galley View isn’t “real” in the sense of how your music will look in print. It’s just a handy working environment.
(P.S. — Don’t be surprised if these few posts we’ve exchanged get moved into a separate, new thread by @dspreadbury. As time allows, he’s very good about trying to move things in ways that make them more focused and searchable in the forum.)
) — not in the sense of they didn’t manage to get me what I wanted, but because those mistakes ultimately wasted my time due to my own gaps in familiarity with Dorico. (This was especially true when trying to notate bigger pieces under deadlines.)
so that the solution is shown at the top of the thread below the OP. That saves anyone else searching a lot of reading time. (It’s also a nice gesture to “share the love” with someone who helped, of course.)
