I started using Sibelius in 1999-2000 just to escape from the madness of Finale. Back then Finale was a pain.
Sibelius came and everything was simple and easy.
Of course I saw the limitation of Sibelius and the fact that was bought bu Avid it was the worst movement ever…
When I needed to write serious scores I went to Sibelius previously I was writing score on Logic which somewhat OK especially for the sake of hearing proper sounds that was one of the problems.
The last years I have lots of orchestral projects and I had to use Sibelius but for many things it pissed off.
All the Sibelius users know to write a simple drum set score is a hack that was never fixed on Sibelius.
Playback capabilities are very bad on Sibelius.
One day I decided to check Dorico. I downloaded the demo
And I realized that this is a serious program and the people who are developing the program are very serious also.
I liked everything about Dorico and mostly the playback capabilities that finally someone can use good libraries with key switches and articulations etc.
Recently I requested the Dorico team to go more towards DAW than going towards engraving sort of program.
The updates of Dorico are very very often than Sibelius.
Lately Sibelius updated the program and put some funny colors and MusicXML functions.
Anyway MusicXML is another joke like midifile maybe better but Dorico even on that does a better job.
I switched from Sibelius after using it from 2006 to 2018. The learning curve takes some time but isn’t as bad as I expected, I think within a couple of months or so I was about as fast at note entry as I had been with Sibelius (but early on the first-duration-then-pitch approach, and having to switch between write and engrave modes, did mess with my head for a while).
The main appeal of Dorico is for me the quality of the engraving and appearance of the scores; it looks about as good as SCORE while being significantly less work (although at the moment also less customiseable, but honestly not by much, and the native support for things like microtones and extended techniques is superior to SCORE in most respects).
My background is exclusively in classical composition so I’m looking for notation software, rather than e.g. a DAW or something that does playback properly; but from that perspective I think Dorico is probably the best software available & will continue to be so for some time.
I too have/had been using Sibelius since V 1.4 and switched around a week ago. The new guitar features tipped things for me as being the time to move. I am trying to allocate time every day to learn more about what feels like such a powerful product and thanks to the amazing people here and a wealth of resources available I’m not only making good progress, but absolutely certain I’ve made the right decision.
I’ve used Sibelius for several years and I recently got into Dorico. I actually think that Tantacrul’s video is very good overall and I agree with a lot of things he said. I’ve found that Dorico takes me a lot more time to input music. On the other hand, once I input it, I find that it almost always looks at least good enough to be presentable in a professional environment. Personally, I need a program that allows me to input music as fast and as easily as possible, but I think that some of Dorico’s features might be able to compensate for that depending on the project. Like the cues for example, which I have been making use of lately. Can you be more specific about what you intend to use Dorico for? That might help determine which option is best for you.
I used Sibelius exclusively for about five years until I bought Dorico 1. I worked with Sibelius alongside Dorico for about a year and then switched to Dorico full-time.
These days I can barely remember remember how Sibelius works. Occasionally I have to open it up to to export an old file and it looks completely alien to me - I’ve no idea where anything is.
It’s interesting that SamiSelf says that it takes him more time to input music with Dorico. The main reason why I eventually gave up on Sibelius is that I was so much faster in Dorico.
I have started using Sibelius with version 1.4. and I worked with the program nearly every day since then. I started using Dorico with version 1 and from version 2.2 on, I switched completely to Dorcio. I am now much faster in Dorico, than I ever was in Sibelius and the output looks brilliant! From time to time I must go back to Sibelius for old files. This feels quite archaic now.
A very long time ago, I took a look at Finale and decided that life was too short to waste time on it. Then a friend in the UK told me of Sibelius and life suddenly got a lot better. At that time, still a long time ago, using Sibelius required me to import an Acorn Computer into the USA. I reluctantly bought my first PC when Sibelius moved from the Acorn. I found working with Sibelius to be delightful until the ribbon was introduced. I was always happy with the results and have just published a major score with Sibelius. I am proud of how this looks. Mahler’s Beethoven IX
I have had Dorico since it first came out. Unfortunately, it still doesnt have all the things that I need for my orchestral score work, so I continue with Sibelius for that. I use Dorico for new keyboard projects and I imported some older keyboard projects from Sibelius. Because these are of early music, with notation that is not as Dorico expects it, such scores need a lot of massaging to make them look as I want. Accordingly, I have abandoned that process and left the scores in Sibelius.
I am not interested in playback and, as I have a quite adequate DAW (Samplitude) with which I do professional recording, I am not interested in Dorico becoming a DAW.
What I would like to see is the ability to print to files for tablets that can be used by ensembles, where the players can see parts on their tablets and on which bowings, dynamics, instrumentation, etc, can easily be changed during rehearsals or sessions. I can import pdf files to ForScore and do many of these things, but it is not quite there yet and I am waiting for Dorico to develop the killer format!
There is no question in my mind that, for music notation, Dorico is the future.
I think we are giving the original poster a quite uncanny experience here. So I would like to assure tripalreno4 that they shouldn’t expect every one of their forum questions being answered by the whole community, especially with this amount of detail.
Judging from other posts, SamiSeif isn’t entering “mainstream” music notation most of the time. Figuring out how to do “non standard” things in Dorico is likely to take longer than already knowing how to do them in Sibelius.
I think that in many cases, Dorico is likely to be faster than Sibelius, but that is not true in my specific case. I am writing contemporary classical music and I use a lot of things that seem to take more time in Dorico than in Sibelius. Some things are indeed faster in Dorico, so I use Dorico or Sibelius depending on the project that I’m working on.
But I also find Dorico to be laggy in general, and I have a fairly powerful computer. Comparing the response time of both programs, Sibelius is by far faster, so that’s a large part of the reason as to why I find Sibelius to be faster. (If anyone has a way to improve Dorico’s response time, I’m all ears).
Yes, you are correct about that. It seems to me like I can basically fake most things I need in Sibelius, but that seems less true in Dorico. While Dorico is better at many things (open meters, different meters in different staves, far more options for symbols, making up key signatures, irrational time signatures, etc.), other things are even harder to fake in Dorico than in Sibelius.
For example, here is a problem I’m dealing with at the moment, I need a few staves in an orchestral score to have no meter at all. This has to be done manually one by one in Dorico. In Sibelius, I can remove all time signatures and copy-paste time signatures in the instruments I need. I can also remove barlines in the parts I don’t want them to appear. This is definitely not ideal, but it’s faster to copy-paste time signatures into all the staves at once than it is to manually input them one at a time.
If all the people who are in one time signature are in the same time signature, you can Alt-click or use the Duplicate to stave above/below shortcuts. It really doesn’t take long…
Duplicate to Staff Below is exactly the ticket here. It’s a lifesaver.
And if you want to skip assigning an item to one particular staff, use Duplicate Below (which I’ve assigned to Ctrl-Alt-M), then move it to the next staff using Alt-M. You can assign an item downwards to 30 staves in a matter of seconds.
Actually, I stand corrected, I just found out that it is in fact possible to copy-paste time signatures into multiple staves in Dorico, and it does actually work significantly better than Sibelius.
But even granted that, there are still things in Dorico that are not “out there” for which there seems to be no support, like adding multiple playing techniques in one go, or adding multiple instruments in one go, or the lack of an align function. So Tantacrul was right when he said “how much suffering is involved”, and I might add, what kind of suffering. So tripalreno4, you should use the free trial to see if this is your preferred kind of suffering. Music notation is always suffering as far as I’m concerned
For adding multiple playing techniques in one go - if you mean the same playing technique to multiple staves, you can do that when the caret is active and extended over the necessary staves.
You can always stick a comma in the arco’s “alternative text” property (which is called that as it’s an alternative continuation), then put a sul pont at the same location. That makes for a quick way of stacking two playing techniques vertically, or you can drag one of them right and up/down in Engrave mode. For that matter, if you don’t care about playback you can stick the sul pont in the alternative text straight after the arco.
