I really must take issue with this assumption. Every single person in the team is a musician of some form or other, involved in composing, arranging, conducting, performing or recording music. We have about 100 years combined experience in the development of music software, and way in excess of that for our experience in using it. (I’ve been using music software since Notator on the Atari ST in 1992). We also all use a very diverse range: Cubase, Logic, Ableton, Max,… If you looked a the Cubase or Wavelab team then you would find the same thing: there are fewer places where you would find as many musicians in one place.
Many posts in this thread can be summarised as, “Why on earth can’t Dorico do X? The developers/Steinberg obviously don’t care about it”
Well, chances are we do care about it. If Dorico doesn’t do X today then that’s probably because we haven’t had the time to commit to doing it and doing it well. We have to be able to do the basics well before adding the bells and whistles. A massive part of our development time has gone on getting the notation engine stable, capable and extensible, as everything hangs off that. Similarly a huge effort has gone into the audio engine (which itself is the product of many years of effort from the Cubase team), upon which Dorico’s playback engine sits. This all takes a lot of time. It will be quite some time before it can do everything that our competitors can do, but we have a lot that our competitors don’t (and more of that coming in the next update). We have to (well, Daniel has to…) make very difficult decisions constantly about which things we have to drop in order to focus on getting other features implemented. We have to devote our time to the areas that will be the most benefit to the most people, which means that often your own preferred feature/bug may not be considered a high priority for the moment.
Re: DAW features. Dorico isn’t a DAW and doesn’t pretend to be. However, there are a lot of DAW features that would be valuable additions, and we will hope to add them. We know that Play Mode may be frustratingly limited at present, but there’s plenty of scope for extra functionality in future versions. Tempo editing? Dynamics? Controller Lanes? Real-time record? Micro-tonal playback? Better support for 3rd party sample libraries? Yep, all things we want to add in the future.
Re: Cubase interop. We don’t know yet what form any future Cubase interoperability may take; all options are on the table. We know that many users have workflows between scoring packages and DAWs going in both directions, so interop is important, but we’ll need to investigate the best options. Cubase and Wavelab are now starting to benefit from closer integration, and we may be able to build on that foundation in Dorico in the future.
Re: engraving focus. Dorico is a scoring tool first and foremost and so engraving quality is of the highest importance and as such is the focus of much of our work. Even if the scoring is very hurriedly prepared for a recording session and then discarded then this is still very important: the scores need to be clear and well-formatted with the minimal amount of editing. If the players have to sight-read it then I’m sure that they care about the quality.
Re: frustrations. Please bear in mind that if there’s something in the application that is very frustrating or limiting to use, then we’re probably finding it very annoying too. Annoying things do tend to get fixed for this very reason.
It should be apparent from the many responses in this thread that every user has completely different priorities, running the spectrum of ‘Don’t care about playback’ through to hyper-realistic rendering with a collection of orchestral libraries. We know though that it is somewhat important to most people. We will never totally please everyone, but we do aim to please as many as possible.