Make sure you have the latest ARIA Player, which comes with Finale 27.4.
Sadly, the version of ARIA are different between Windows and Mac, which confuses things like sharing Playback Templates.
Thanks benwiggy, that’s great. I’d looked at some of the note entry videos but they were mostly about entering notes via computer keyboard or recording in.
The only difference is pressing the key on the MIDI keyboard, instead of ABCDEFG.
Ah, got it! Thanks
Hello Dorico,
Wow, this is a big learning curve. I can’t find the things I want to do. Do you have a nice video course that explains the basics of how to use Dorico? As well as short course on how to do more advanced things? A lot of us Finale users are going to need help. Would be great to set up some live Q&A sessions too maybe?
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Have you watched these videos that Steinberg released specifically for people switching from Finale to Dorico? https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoyaeouPUsds4tcAcLTR1lrrvloMkGPo_&si=DXXZCK90MPw3UEhY
The official Dorico YouTube channel currently has 437 videos, including live streams, albeit some of them aren’t in English: https://www.youtube.com/@dorico/videos
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I know everyone is feeling a bit shocked, and angry, and even a little bit frightened
I am feeling very shocked and angry. I can’t get Dorico Pro 5 to download and there’s no customer support. Every time I try to create a help ticket, it says that help is provided by redistributers and maybe try to forums… that link takes me to the only Yamaha distributer in Canada… that doesn’t provide Dorico Pro 5 support.
- I tried to download the software and got error messages.
- I used the help guide, where it says you have to download 5 files before trying to load the install assistant. Did that successfully.
- The assistant partially loads, but when it asks me to sign in, it crashes.
- The IT department in my school couldn’t get it to work, either.
Now I feel like… Steinberg did a hostile takeover of my software that I’ve been using since 2001, is shutting it down, but didn’t replace it with a functioning install mechanism and doesn’t provide adequate customer support.
If my school’s IT department can’t get it to work, then what chance do I have?
(Being more calm)… could someone from Steinberg please reach out to me? If this gets to be an urgent situation, we’ll have to look at moving our school to Sibelius instead (if the installers are duds and we never get it to work…)
Thanks!
Welcome, @aekeus . Sorry for your first experience.
You’ll get much better support from the Dorico team here.
You may want to start a new thread, and provide as much detail as possible about the error messages, what OS you’re on, and any other relevant issues.
Normally, you should just need to download the Steinberg Download Assistant, and take it from there. Perhaps your school has a firewall or proxy server that’s getting in the way?
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Welcome to the forum, @aekeus, and to Dorico.
I was a Finale user from 1990–2022, when I switched to Dorico. I have definitely had the experience of dis- and re-orientation, but didn’t have to do so under conditions that felt so out of my control. I wish you and all others hit hard by this week the best!
As Ben says above (along with many others), you will find this forum to be an incredibly generous and helpful place. Solution-oriented questions get a lot of attention from highly experienced users and the Dorico team members. You will be supported.
I do ask one favor, though, in regards to this comment:
Since there’s no actual evidence of this being the case (and since there’s actually no “take-over” in any corporate sense), would you please give more careful thought before offering these kinds of comments? There are a lot of hard-pressed and stressed Finale users (even I’m facing many hours of MusicXML exporting…) grappling with a stressful week, but a focus on facts and solutions will help everyone navigate it better.
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As a Sibelius user that also uses Dorico, you need to give some time to yourself to learn the concept and how to do things on a new software. It is not easy or something that will come over night. Everything will be slow and out of place in the beginning.
I know this feeling. You want to do things like you did in Finale, and want to be as fast as before. Maybe you can ask for a refund, but you also can give some time to yourself.
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Hi @owensm11,
Welcome to the forum. I’m sorry you’re having a frustrating time. Dorico does things differently, in some ways. My experience (coming from Sib rather than Finale) is that it’s worth persisting.
Have you seen this document? It’s designed to help people get off to a good start.
I have regarded. You are right, I didn’t have the last version of Aria Player.
It was: v1.872
I updated it and now it is: v1.959
Thanks.
We can see on the picture that the MakeMusic date is no more 2016, but 2019
Thank you. I had just deleted my previous post before I saw your reply because I had written it in haste out of sheer frustration. I will look at your link and hope to get more comfortable with this in time.
This is a long standing issue. No idea why it was never attended to. If you have a lot of these you can edit the xml file in a text editor or open the file in musescore and reexport it before opening it in Dorico…
An updated version of First Steps that picks up changes in the 5.1 cycle is now available on the new steinberg.help site (only on the new site, not the archive site).
Link for the First Steps 5.1 guide (webhelp version) is here
The guide’s supporting resources (reference PDFs and starter Dorico projects) are now attached directly to the webhelp version of the guide, on the “attachments tab” (click the paperclip button on the left of the window). For anyone reading the PDF version, there are direct links to the corresponding page in the webhelp, for easy access to those files.
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I just wanted to mention that most Finale converts are probably used to pitch-first input. The First Steps Guide is obviously duration-first. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think any of the Prerequisite sections mention that you need to have Preferences / Note Input and Editing / “By default, specify pitch: After Duration” selected for the First Steps Guide to be an accurate workflow. A mention of that could be helpful.
For any new converts that want pitch-first input, you can specify your default method in this Preferences setting, or switch on the fly with K
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Despite ditching Steinberg’s eLicenser it seems that nothing has changed.
Funny thing - all I did was type in “Dorico Installation” in the search bar of this forum and this was the first post that popped up. What a joke.
Sadly this is exactly my experience with other Steinberg software.
The problem is Steinberg’s requirement to use ‘installers’ that are really just dysfunctional bloatware… The fact that Steinberg cannot get their own installers to function says it all. The fact that Steinberg writes software to troubleshoot their own software is a red flag.
I’ve been a Finale user since 2015. I want to try Dorico - but, not like this.
No thank you.
What a shame.
Spent much of the last two days trying to download the software using the assistant. It stops just before a module is finished, then the app locks up. I have to re-boot the computer to start over. Sometimes it continues from a earlier point in the download, and sometimes it starts over from the beginning. A very disappointing introduction to the product.
At the end of yesterday, I had 7 of 11 modules supposedly download and installed, and when I started back up today, only 4 now say “install again” showing they are active (from my limited understanding of how the assistant works). The others now are paused, with continue as the selection choice. The first one that I selected continue, is now starting the download again.
I’m glad Finale has changed their tune and will let Finale authorization remain active for the foreseeable future. For my limited use of the product, this will save me the time rushing to learn a new product. My rush to ‘invest’ in Dorico is a reminder not to panic about software, especially software that I use occasionally.
But I will spend a little time, once Dorico is finally loaded, to give it a try. Some have said wonderful things about it, and all those thing may be true!
Well, of course, people only post when something goes wrong; not when it works. Here’s a post about Finale authorization problems.
https://www.finaleforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=19119
I would suggest give it a try, at the very least; and if it goes wrong, and you’re not prepared to spend time on it: then fair enough. But plenty of people install and licence the software every day without issue.
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Steinberg software is unusually terrible compared to everything else out there.
But, sure, knock yourself out if the user is okay with spending the next 5 to 24 hours in limbo attempting to install Dorico, desperately searching forums for answers, and randomly installing/uninstalling junk software.
Steinberg was the reason I switched from Cubase to Logic Pro - and I’ve never looked back.
I never had issues with installing Finale.
I never had issues installing Logic Pro.
Problem solved.
Sorry for being so blunt. I was actually hoping to find the opposite when I searched for “Dorico Installation” - instead I was reminded of the nightmares of Steinberg software. An experience I don’t plan to repeat.