Why institutions still choose Sibelius over Dorico

Dorico
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Hi all,

I’ve been using Dorico for about 3 years alongside Sibelius for over 20, and while I’m impressed by many of Dorico’s advanced capabilities (polymeters, semantic approach, etc.), I’m finding it difficult to fully transition due to several workflow inefficiencies that particularly impact transcription and contemporary music work.

I recently left a music technology position at a boarding school where we exclusively used Sibelius, despite being aware of Dorico’s capabilities. The deciding factor wasn’t feature limitations, but daily workflow barriers that make transcription work significantly slower in Dorico. This appears to be a broad institutional trend - major conservatories like Berklee, NEC, Boston Conservatory, etc. still primarily use Finale and Sibelius for their notation courses, with Juilliard’s extension program listing “Finale, Sibelius, and more” but notably omitting Dorico from their digital tools curriculum.

Key workflow barriers I’ve encountered:

Input efficiency - Lack of keyboard shortcuts displayed on UI elements forces constant referring to the documentation. This is a major yet simple oversight that affects productivity. Similarly, having to memorize/refer to the documentation for all popover functions slows things down further. Something as simple as a contextual overlay would help immensely.

Chord symbol handling - The default logic requires manual override for each layout when creating lead sheets, a core requirement for contemporary/jazz transcription that should be streamlined. Having every instrument by default prepared to show chord changes, and having them by default be per instrument rather than applying to all those that are “setup” to do so would be much more efficient.

Rhythmic notation - While Dorico handles complex meters beautifully, basic subdivision display and beaming modifications require workarounds that interrupt transcription flow. Quick beam splitting/joining should be immediately accessible, and creating subdivisions for any type of meter should be as easy as a dialogue box. It’s nearly impossible (at least in my experience) to get measures to subdivide in 16th divisions without multiple workarounds.

Mode switching - Having to switch to Engraving mode for basic system breaks disrupts transcription workflow where layout adjustments are constant. Similarly, it slows things down when all a user wants to do is adjust the location of something like staff/system text while inputting music.

Playback accessibility - The template system, while powerful, lacks simple presets for common ensembles, making basic playbook setup unnecessarily complex. Why not have a simple dropdown or menu option that forces VSTi’s into “Orchestral”, “Jazz”, “Pop”? This would save users an immense amount of time sifting through the hundreds of vst options.

I’m curious if others doing significant transcription/arranging work have found solutions to these workflow challenges, or if there are plans to address the input efficiency gap that’s preventing broader adoption in educational and professional transcription contexts.

I don’t intend this post as a jab at Steinberg or the Dorico team. I really do love the software when it works for me, but as an educator and longtime transcriptionist/arranger there’s a lot that keep not only myself but entire institutions from making the switch. There is a lot of discourse on these forums over the software’s design and the intended way to notate music. As a longtime musician and more recently computer scientist… why cant the software be updated to encompass these things?

Best,
Marcello

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Thanks for your feedback, Marcello. I’m always wary of people who make pronouncements about definitive reasons why the world is at is is – and I would wager that in my role as product manager for Dorico, over the years I’ve spoken to a lot more educators and institutions even than you have – but your feedback is absolutely welcomed. It’s not, of course, the whole story – there are many, many other factors that play a part (familiarity, inertia, budget, licensing, etc.) – but of course niggly product issues are a significant factor.

In general, Dorico does display keyboard shortcuts in tool tips for most buttons in the UI in Play mode, but there are exceptions (the buttons in the right-hand toolbox being a notable one). This is due to the mixture of UI technologies used in different parts of the project window, and is something we would like to address in future.

Regarding chord symbols, I’m curious to know more about what you’re overriding in each layout. Are you creating totally different chord symbols for each instrument in the ensemble (i.e. using local chord symbols for everyone), or is it that you want chord symbols to show by default for every player, regardless of whether they are considered a rhythm section instrument?

For rhythmic divisions, if you spend a few minutes searching the forum you’ll see many threads on this topic. There is certainly more work for us to do in this area, and in a future version we will expand the possibilities provided by e.g. Notation Options.

You’ll need to be more specific about the playback template issues you’re having. Dorico already provides the best available sound assignments for orchestral, jazz, and pop instruments (and indeed all instruments) chosen from the default sound content provided with the software. That’s precisely what the factory playback templates are for. If your complaint is that you don’t think e.g. the choices for jazz ensembles sound particularly good, that’s a different issue: it’s not to do with the way Dorico’s playback templates work, but rather to do with which sounds Dorico includes by default. I would certainly agree that in particular the default brass sounds that come with Dorico aren’t especially well-suited for jazz ensembles.

We never rest on our laurels, and we work tirelessly to improve Dorico day after day. (I’m not sure the people at Avid could, hand on heart, truly say the same.) New institutions choose Dorico every day, but we are not complacent about it, and we are dedicated to continuing to improve Dorico for every customer, whether they are an individual teacher or a big institution like Berklee or Juilliard (both of whom do use Dorico, by the way).

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I think the beauty of the popovers is such that you only need know ‘how it works’, rather than memorizing all possible terms. At its most basic, the Popovers use standard musical terms: trill, fermata, Andante, Dacapo, staccato; Eb (key), treble (clef), or a number.

You can always use the side panel for most things, instead of the popovers, if you don’t know what the command is.

It might be possible to conveniently summarize the basic syntax in a tooltip, but for something like the Intervals popover, the list of commands would be too big.

There’s an argument that the Beam splitting commands should have default key shortcuts (I use X and Alt X for joining and splitting); though one set of defaults never fits all. Dorico’s ability to customize itself for a variety of workflows is one of its key strengths; though I imagine that most educators wouldn’t teach a heavily modified setup.

Can you explain the problem and your proposed solution here more fully? I don’t really understand. Is a Trumpet orchestral, jazz or pop…? Most beginners would just choose a Playback Template, and be done.

I’ve had a few tries with Sibelius, but never really got on with it; but nearly all my work is transcribing music from manuscripts and printed sources; and I find Dorico very fast. Admittedly, that’s after several years, and becoming familiar with it.

Dorico could do with being a bit more ‘discoverable’ in places; and there are things like flipping a tie but not the stems, which you have to switch to Engrave mode for; but on the whole, I think it’s pretty fast. Perhaps we could have a race between experienced users, transcribing the same piece in Sibelius and Dorico?

I’d be very surprised if any school was going to teach Finale next year.

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By now, y’all know my three biggest workflow enhancers, so I leave it at that… :wink:
I couldn’t imagine using Dorico without those, sounds clickbaity, I know…

Benji

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Thanks Daniel and Ben for engaging with my points! I really appreciate having discussions like this. I’m really hoping to offer constructive criticism here while acknowledging the power and usefulness that I’ve found in the software.

Daniel, I appreciate your perspective from conversations with educators. My experience has been specifically focused on implementation decisions rather than product demos or general feedback sessions, which might offer a different point of view. My family and I have been in the music education world for 40 years, so I understand the institutional perspective from multiple angles.

Regarding institutional usage, you’re absolutely right that Berklee and Juilliard do use Dorico. However, there’s an important distinction between “uses” and “has completely adopted” that I think gets lost in these discussions. At Berklee, for example, I see that the composition and film scoring departments now offer Dorico Pro as an option alongside Sibelius Ultimate, and their online courses include Dorico instruction. I think this actually reinforces the point I’m making: Dorico adoption tends to be compositionally focused. As a two-time Berklee graduate, our transcription and arranging work primarily used Sibelius, with Finale as a secondary option. When institutions evaluate notation software, they’re looking at workflow efficiency for their core pedagogical mission across all skill levels.

At Phillips Academy, we teach a broad range of courses from music basics to advanced theory, jazz theory, songwriting, arranging, and music technology. Our students have varying computer proficiency levels, so ease of use is extremely important, even more-so than customizability. My fellow educators, students, and I have felt that Sibelius’s extremely visual approach - where actions and shortcuts are immediately apparent - works better for our institutional needs than Dorico’s more abstract workflow model.

On the technical points you raised:

UI shortcuts: It’s helpful to know this is a UI technology limitation rather than a design choice. My experience and that of my colleagues has been that rather than having to hover over elements to see keyboard shortcuts, they should be immediately visible; this is quite clear in other notation software. Are there plans to unify these technologies in future versions?

Chord symbols: The issue is not treating chord symbols like any other staff or system text by default. For example, when transcribing for full jazz orchestra, having to manually determine that each player can “see” or “not see” chord symbols made input extremely slow. I’m aware of the workarounds and use them, but this goes back to having to search through documentation and forums for something that should be default behavior.

Rhythmic divisions: I was transcribing a Don Ellis tune where I needed to subdivide 9/8 into 16th note subdivisions of 3,2,2,2,3,2,2,2. Having to input bracketed time signatures immediately into the time signature popover is tedious and feels unintuitive. Couldn’t subdivisions go in the properties panel? In addition, subdivisions faster than eighth notes don’t seem to currently work correctly in the popovers. For example, in the Don Ellis tune, I had to either manually beam two conjoined measures of 9/16 and hide the barline, or manually beam a single measure of 9/8 and copy/paste every time I used it. I’ve implemented workarounds successfully, but when you mention expanding Notation Options in future versions, are we talking about simplified subdivision entry methods?

Playback templates: your point about the default brass sounds being inadequate is a perfect example. When transcribing Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” for a class of students, I wanted plain, dry solo brass sounds. The default playback template resulted in what my students and I felt was a weird mixture of textures with varying attacks/decays, reverb, tonality, etc. While it’s great that there are many options, in institutional situations, many students and instructors write for unorthodox instrumentation and need basic sounds immediately for a straightforward setup.

Ben, I appreciate your workflow suggestions, but there’s a fundamental difference between individual power-user optimization and institutional adoption requirements. My fellow educators and I have found that issues like chord symbol setup, drum kits requiring manual slash noteheads, and other examples create barriers when students and educators need speed and intuitivity. This seems to work well for compositionally-based tasks but less-so for transcription and arranging. While experienced users can customize shortcuts and memorize popover syntax, institutions need software that works efficiently across varying skill levels without extensive customization.

Personally, I found Dorico’s learning curve steep initially before settling out. This is fine for my usage. Unfortunately, my students in semester-long courses don’t have that time luxury, and by the time they start feeling comfortable, the course is over. We do not have this issue with Sibelius or MuseScore. My experience has been that this is due to what feels like inconsistent complexity/simplicity in Dorico. Many things that should be simple feel needlessly complex, while many things which are difficult in other software are just a button click away in Dorico. This is simultaneously one of Dorico’s strengths and challenges from an educational perspective.

The “race” idea is interesting, but it highlights exactly what I’m talking about - this isn’t about individual speed once you’re an expert, it’s about the learning curve, and in my experience Dorico is slower for the scenerios I’m describing.

I’d be happy to provide testing/feedback for workflow improvements, especially from a computer science perspective. My goal here isn’t to criticize Dorico’s approach, it’s to help it reach a wider audience!

Best,
Marcello

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It’s natural for an institution to standardize on a given program or environment in order to support it fully, and Sibelius is a fine program; but the question remains whether one is teaching Sibelius rather than Dorico because it is easier or because it is the better program.

Folks can judge that for themselves, but I (and I suspect other current users) do not wish for Dorico to be made to look or work like Sibelius, and we trust the Development Team to develop the software as they have done so far, successfully.

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Those are very constructive points, Marcello, and I recognise your aims! I expect Dorico will continue to develop in terms of ease of use.

There’s a balance between ease of use, design consistency and power that the development team will continue to have to negotiate.

One thing I would say - in order to take advantage of even a fraction of Dorico’s power, student users need to be taught about popovers and the jump bar. Without that, they will always feel hamstrung.

But in cases where ease of use for beginners is paramount, other products may indeed be better at the moment, at least in some ways. Maybe those friction points will reduce over time - I expect so.

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We’re entering a time where it’s hard to tell if a text has been rewritten by AI… just saying…
I am a non-English speaker, but sometimes things seem to be too perfect… just a gut feeling.

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I don’t feel there’s any question that these are Marcello’s opinions - does it matter to you if they have been rephrased automatically? - which I’m not sure they have!

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I came from Sbelius to Dorico.

Your point about Mode Switching. One of things (of many) that drove me crazy with Sibelius was trying to move things like bar widths and then upset other nearby elements by accident. Dorico’s solution to separate the writing process from the setup, engrace, playback and print processes is a really genious cleanup of the problem with other score editors.

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This exactly, with me as well. Unintentional edits were a huge waste of time. I would mean to move a slur or something and would accidentally add a new note somewhere. And the problems where I would have items too close to each other and couldn’t select one without moving other things out of the way first (only to have to move them back later).

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It’s way faster to write a one-page long text in Word (when you don’t know anything about computers or real text editors).
Using LaTeX requires some work. But it’s free, and very powerful. And when you need to write a real paper (as a memoir or a scientific paper) it’s second to none. Guess what they use in science university in France (at least, all those students or teachers I’ve been talking to)? Word.
Using the easier tool to learn in one week is not always a good idea. Just sayin’…

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@mducharme I don’t disagree, those are totally valid issues with Sibelius that I too have experienced!

In my experience, the nature of these forums makes it seem that any sort of criticism is an affront to Steinberg or the Dorico team, which again is not my intent at all. Let me put it a different way: as someone who taught and wrote curriculum for music production and engineering, I primarily had my students use Logic Pro. At the beginning of every term, a student or two would state “Yeah but Abelton is so much better”, or “Why aren’t we using Pro Tools?” To which I’d reply that they all are great tools, some have strengths and weaknesses that are opposites of other programs but at the end of the day they all serve the same purpose. For the vast majority of DAWs, this is very true and to this day it’s not too difficult to jump from one to another.

There is a much larger gap between notation software, and the way things are going Dorico will be (or has already become?) the industry leader. My intent with this sort of post is not to say that Dorico should behave more like Sibelius or Finale or MuseScore, it’s to bridge gaps in the software that make the contrast between it and those less stark, especially for newcomers and those who don’t use it primarily for composition.

@MarcLarcher I also believe in a way that you’re further reinforcing my point, which you may disagree with. I WANT full adoption of Dorico, I think it’s a fantastic program. But like LaTeX, it’s not simple to learn in a week. If the intent is to write a scientific paper, and students find it universally more intuitive to do so in Word, then of course they will stay with word. If at the end of the day they’ve written a paper that effectively gets the job done, then why would they opt for something more complex?

I truly believe that Dorico is what everyone will be using within the next decade, I’m just suggesting UX elements that would make the adoption easier. That does not mean simplifying the preexisting capabilities!

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Honestly, I don’t understand the complaints about Dorico being hard to learn.
When I switched from Finale to Dorico a few years ago. I had at that time been a VERY long time user of Finale (30+ years).

My first day with Dorico I spent watching some “how to get started” tutorials.
Within a week I was walking briskly, 2 weeks and I was running, and after a month or two I was flying.

Sure every once in a while I get stuck with something and have to refer to either the helpful forum people, or googling stuff on the interwebz.

But even after 30+ years of Finale I was doing the exact same thing! I doubt anyone becomes so expert with a software package that they NEVER have to resort to asking a question or two every once in a while.

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+1
It’s easy to input text into Word, but it takes aeons to get it to look “right”, which is “default mode” in LaTeX… Same goes for Dorico IMO. The time saving in Dorico’s “almost perfect from the start” is invaluable.

(Here in Sweden, HS students tend to pick up any of the free LaTeX editors and use them with excellent results. Now, the HS-teaching faculty and government institutions (which create standardised tests, etc.) use Word and MathType(sp?). LaTeX is not an easy program, but it’s not that hard, and it pays off to spend some time with it.)

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It’s great to hear all of your perspectives. I feel like I can safely assume that the majority of people in this forum post are longtime musicians or composers such as yourselves and that’s fantastic.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a 9th grade student who has never seen music notation in their life, or even a college student who has extensive knowledge of sheet music but limited access to notation software. These are vastly different scenarios than being an experienced composer such as yourself for multiple decades, and that should be taken into consideration, not ignored because of your individual beliefs that “putting the time into learning is better”. Everyone navigates their musical path in different ways, and it feels a bit close minded to assume that everybody who uses Dorico should have to make an effort towards using it to its full potential. I feel that much of its full potential could be streamlined for that child who wants to make a lead sheet for their friends, but has never done so before. So much is locked behind the software’s ‘intent’

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Welcome to the forum, Marcello.
I would expect that Dorico, being a newer, evolving (shall I say “maturing”) product is a major factor in the decision for major academic institutions to offer it in their curriculums, or even as a tool. With Finale having been so ubiquitous for a long time, and the subsequent entry of Sibelius as a powerful alternate, I can see that there would be no need to add another platform to the mix. However, now with the “sunsetting” of Finale, I expect that institutions will take another look at Dorico. I agree that there is room for improvement and continued development (and often a paradigm shift from the way one is used to doing things) but Dorico is proving itself to be a powerful and robust application that eliminates much of the “tweaking” that users accepted as necessary in Finale. Sibelius and other packages will continue to develop and improve as well over time. The real question will inevitably be “Which software package(s) will best serve and prepare the students of our institutions in the long run, and in the music marketplace for at least part of the foreseeable future?”
— Jim

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You have some valid points. It might be hard for a beginner to adapt to Dorico and, without any factual proofs, I assume that many of the “usual suspects” here on the forum also have some extensive computer skills, some come from Lilipond or Amadeus (much, much more difficult programs), some edit and/or construct fonts, some have used LaTeX for decades which makes Dorico look like pen and paper in complexity, some write JSON or LUA code…. With such “personal history” most software might look easy. I personally did not like Dorico 1.0 at all and returned at v3.5. It took me perhaps 2 weeks to ‘learn it’ to my required level. Yes, I learnt Sibelius faster, but if you value quality of output, spend time with Dorico instead.

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I absolutely and wholeheartedly agree with your perspective, Jim! The question you raised, “Which software package(s) will best serve and prepare the students of our institutions in the long run, and in the music marketplace for at least part of the foreseeable future?” is exactly why I made this post, because I too agree that Dorico is extremely powerful and most likely will be that piece of software.

Being the newest, there is the most room from a developmental standpoint to reach that goal, so long as barriers such as the ones I described are addressed. That way the community can expand as well!

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How can you “bridge the gaps” and make the contrast between the programs less stark without making Dorico behave more like Sibelius / Finale / Musescore?

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