The ‘new’ score editor comes in quite handy but lacks some features of its predecessors. I’d like to be able again to place text (and sometimes other objects as well) freely. When I have to put a comment (e.g. concerning the song structure) below the written music my present workaround is to use the copyright area - that gives me at least one line 
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Yes, this is on purpose. It will never get all the features of its predecessors.
See the article here: Introducing the new Dorico-powered Score Editor in Cubase 14 – Dorico
Specifically, this paragraph:
The functional scope of the new Score Editor is also much more focused than the existing Score Editor: instead of attempting to provide all the capabilities of dedicated music notation software within Cubase, the new Score Editor provides fewer tools for working with the minutiae of notation and engraving. If you find yourself needing these tools, we recommend using the new Export to Dorico feature to continue working on those fine details in Dorico itself.
However doesn’t mean they aren’t listening to feedback as to what people really need out of the Score Editor. So some features you need may be added. But some tasks will probably always require bringing it over to the full Dorico program.
Another £500 to find.
Yes, getting into the notation software ecosystem can be expensive for the first purchase. After the big initial outlay, changing or upgrading software is cheaper because there are usually crossgrade options from other notation programs.
Dorico has crossgrade options for anybody who had a previous version of Sibelius or Finale anytime in the past. So if you had a license for either notation program before, you should be able to crossgrade for significantly less. I do not believe there is any such option for Cubase as of yet.
I recall they also did a sale last year where if you were an existing Steinberg customer for one product you could get a different product for a significant discount.
Sure, but since that doesn’t work, no one will try that in Dorico nor pay for it because they’ll assume it won’t work there because its technically the same engine Cubase uses. The logic is a bit crooked. Not every user that is inputting scores into a DAW want a full feature score editor. They just want simple scores for handouts or similar. That would be like telling you the only way to have your hedge trimmer cutting better is to replace it with a lawnmower.
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I would generally expect people to realize that the Cubase Score Editor is probably not going to be as full featured as Dorico. The engine may be the same, but most of the GUI is not exposed. Pretty much nothing from the Dorico GUI is able to be maintained, they’re having to rebuild it in Cubase using Cubase widgets - so many many things are not there.
It can already do “simple scores” in my view. The problem is that most people who say they want simple scores actually also want one or two advanced features.
A lot of these things that people assume are easy because they can describe them easily (ex. “I want to hide the title and have it not take up any space so that the music moves up”) actually require bringing over another large swath of the program UI-wise - i.e. bringing over entire advanced features so that people can do a task that can be described in a simple way.
Freely moving objects in Dorico is done in Engrave mode, which is a different “view” of the score that will only show as a page view and doesn’t allow you to add anything to the page - all it allows you to do is format the score or part by allowing things to be moved around freely, and allows you to choose which bars appear on which systems, etc. But in engrave mode you can’t add notes or change notes, you can just fine-tune the appearance of things. Engrave mode is not currently available in Cubase, only Write mode from Dorico is (where you can’t move anything).
They will likely need to think about how to best support these types of things in Cubase. Duplicating the Dorico layout by having the two score views (one for writing, one for engraving) might be confusing for Cubase users by presenting a version of the score where they can’t add notes or do anything but they can move things around. They might accidentally call that up and wonder why they can’t add notes at all. This is clear in Dorico because there is a huge button at the top showing you that you are in engrave mode, but might not be so clear in Cubase.
Even then, moving things around freely in engrave mode - you can do this as long as you are moving it around inside the “music frame” which is essentially everything except for the header (where the title is) and footer (where the copyright notice is). To put things outside of the music frame, you have to go into the page template editor in Dorico, which is the desktop publishing engine, and add the text directly to the page template.
So what seems to be a straightforward request “I want to be able to move anything anywhere” can actually involve having to move large swaths of the original program over, and then the added maintenance going into the future to maintain the two different UI’s (one in Cubase, one in Dorico) for the same group of features.
Exactly!
I stopped using C14 to create scores for my musicians. It´s simply no longer possible to achieve the tired and trusted results of 30 years of Cubase history.
No solution for handling repeats, no hiding of objects, no free text, almost no options to edit the number of bars per staff, which changes because of implemented automation mechanisms all the time anyway
Lead sheets get spread out over too many pages, where one or two pages used to be enough before C14.
Indeed. I paid through the nose for a program which had a fairly comprehensive score editor. And now I have to fork out another £500? Just because?
And people wonder why I’m grumpy.
Yes, putting text and objects freely would fill a lot of holes in the current feature set.
Score editing team is currently focused on getting scores in Cubase to look amazing, in sacrifice of functionality, saying that we should move to Dorico for advanced features.
To me this is somewhat backwards. Dorico is for professional engraving, where scores can be made at the highest aesthetic standards suitable for publishing. Scores made in Cubase however need not look good; they just need to convey info to players in studio sessions. It’s fine if they’re messy. It’s fine if objects are haphazardly aligned as long as I can convey the needed info. Currently, I often can’t convey the needed info in Cubase 14. The lack of glissandi, rips, and falls was a glaring example of this; if there was simply a line tool I could draw them in, but without that I’m stuck waiting for the feature to be implemented.
Cubase 13’s score editor was great for my use case of quickly creating scores when I wasn’t doing a professional engrave. I’m very much hoping the new score editing team loosens the focus on aesthetics and returns it more to function.
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I would expect a Score editor to be pitched as “powered by the Dorico engine” to behave exactly like Dorico does, especially considering the vast majority of musicians are not tech-savy. Duck principle.
Which even being the case, are completely different than replacing your current workflow with a different workflow from another, rather expensive, software which for them will be single purpose only and introduce other pain points, like not syncing with Cubase, which would force them to change their workflow. You don’t buy a new car just because you want better seats.
And this whole bit of text illustrates my point exactly. Dorico is extremely unintuitive from the point of view of someone who just wants to do quick scores to supplement a music project they’re working on. The workflow you describe would be what a professional engraver would be doing on an already finished score in order to improve readability among other things. In my opinion, assuming a user needs advanced engraving features when they only want to move text freely is a dangerous line to stand on and indirectly feeds into unnecessary consumerism. “No, you don’t want the simple score editor with the free moving text feature, no. You actually want the $500 score editor software that will confuse you with features you’ll never use, complicate your workflow since it doesn’t integrate well with the software you actually want to be using but look at all these features!”
I personally wouldn’t go around thinking the needs of a person asking for a feature on a score editor built into a DAW are the exact same as the ones from an engraver using a fully featured score editor therefore the best choice is the standalone score editor.
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No - at the moment I can probably notate an entire page in Dorico in the same amount of time as it would take me to write one system in the Cubase score editor (although I’m quite fast in Dorico). Almost completely different interface, completely different note entry system. It is actually a bit disorienting as a Dorico user because it is like working in a different program when it comes to the commands and what everything does and the keyboard hotkeys, but the output and some other things look the same so it tricks the brain into thinking you’re in Dorico itself. So it is a lot like working in a parallel world that looks the same but right is left and up is down.
I would say that Dorico is a very powerful and full featured notation program, and there are difficulties in making things “intuitive” in that way. Often “intuitive” is “how I expect this to work based on how other similar programs I have used worked”, which is limiting because then all programs have to work like each other. Dorico took a new approach to notation software, as though if we had no such thing as a notation program before, what could be done better in the design. I have found that people who start using Dorico from the start and didn’t use a notation program before find it perfectly intuitive.
It isn’t about micro-transactions or putting such features behind a paywall. The point of separating engraving from writing is that people could easily move things around accidentally when making other edits. Before Dorico I used Sibelius, and there are a huge number of times working in Sibelius and other things I’ve gotten frustrated by this - moving things I did not mean to and then having to reset them back to default location in the menu. I quite like the separation of Dorico into write and engrave because it protects against accidental changes that I didn’t mean to make. But unfortunately in the case of Cubase this split is a bit more of a challenge.
Exactly. This is how you like to work and that’s how your workflow goes, which is not what the OP does otherwise this post wouldn’t sort of request the feature.
You’re looking at intuitiveness from the perspective of integrating a standalone score editor into a DAW, which is what you’d get with ProTools + Sibelius. The outlook here is the perspective of a DAW user missing a feature in the built-in score editor. Two different workflows, two different use cases.
Once again, the OP stated it doesn’t want to buy Dorico just because one functionality that OP thinks should be there doesn’t exist. Having freely placeable text should not cost $500, changing your entire workflow and having to learn another piece of software which might not even do what you’re looking for in the first place.
That isn’t really what I meant - I was just using that as an example for how the Cubase Score Editor does not really reflect the capabilities of Dorico.
It is ultimately going to be up the developers what gets added, but I know they are taking user feedback into account. I’m also not suggesting that I disagree with features like that being added, I’m merely trying to explain why it has not been done yet. It isn’t as simple as it seems in this specific case.
This is exactly my point of view. So, please vote if you think the same