Dorico 5.1 Update - Smart Polyphony Playback

[John Driscoll]

For all your fugue nerds, Dorico 5.1 has a new polyphony balancing playback feature. Pretty nice demo in the Scoring Notes review...

Dorico 5.1: Filling the gaps - Scoring Notes

 

[HS Teoh]

Interesting... so in theory somebody could use this feature to produce a convincing playback and claim it to be his own performance?

[John Driscoll]

Or her own... But this update just came out so I don't think it relates to your particular issues!

[HS Teoh]

Haha it's not that serious to be called my "issues". 😅 It was just an interesting possibility that I thought of.

There's also the interesting issue of whether a composer ought to invest in a perfect mock-up that 100% reflects his intentions, or settle for likely imperfections in a real performance. In the former case one can resort to things like lines that are unplayable by a real instrument, but creates the sound you have in mind. Or instruments that only exist digitally. How far is one willing to go to achieve perfection? Or is the human factor the deciding factor in a performance?

[HS Teoh]

Interesting! I've never really thought of it that way before.

I'm not sure where I stand on the spectrum of platonic/structuralist.  I compose with a specific sound in mind, a specific intent, which you may say is the Platonic ideal. However, I'm also open, and rather interested in fact, in others' interpretation of my work that may not match my conception of it.  In fact, sometimes I myself am not very clear how exactly a specific passage ought to be interpreted, and I find it quite enlightening to discover how others interpret it.  In fact, sometimes I myself interpret (perform) my own work differently on different occasions. In that way the music becomes a vehicle with which to convey my subjective state at the time. Yet at the same time there's this ideal sound that I strive for.  What does that make me, a Platonist or a structuralist? :-D

[Kristofer Emerig]

Thanks from a fugue-nerd, but this is probably only useful to the most narrow band of fugue-nerd-clavichordists, as fugue-nerd-harpsichordists, fugue-nerd-organists- and fugue-nerd-virginalists haven't any appreciable dynamic range in a real-world-fugue-nerd-acoustic-instrumental setting.

The prevailing misconception out there (largely held by those who have never played a harpsichord, virginals, or spinet) is that harpsichords have no dynamic range whatsoever. They do indeed have a range, but it is minuscule compared to the clavichord and piano, which are struck, rather than plucked.

[David]

there are two sides to this -- the polyphonic voice balancing is now working quite well in general after some changes were made to the defaults (not sure whether my input on the matter helped things here). The other side which is actually what you're maybe referring to specifically for fugal music (which of course in itself doesn't interest me) is the "use rules for contrapuntal music". In my polyphonic but not fugal piano music, it was never of much use when i first tried it but it does seem to work quite well in the "Wohltemperierte Klavier" sample project. At any rate, Dorico is leading the way in trying to add ever more musical intelligence into its playback and I'm sure things will continue to get more refined. 

[Ivor]

 I had a look at Dorico 5.1 round up (and wasn’t impressed by the creative marketing that it deals with 150 bugs! It says that Steinberg counted on users to do their testing.

I’m unlikely to upgrade from 3.5 because it hasn’t yet got round to certain requirements like cutaway scores and sorting out the “change voices” with tuplets on the same stave that makes a mess all the way along a staff. I’m only interested in it for engraving  

I’m not interested in playback, just engraving and printing.

As it already cost me c £500 for 3.5, (Unless I’ve read the upgrade/update list wrong) it now wants to extort another £430 from me for a few bits and pieces of limited use. Fine for the professional whose scores will need to be printed and read; but for a hobbyist who perhaps hopes to get a performance through one outlet or another it’s miles too expensive. Each finished score has so far cost me £23.80. Very few of these scores are likely to go anywhere. But…the attraction is, should the occasion arise I can extract parts.

I can’t see myself ever composing with notation software maybe because of the time I’ve spent with pencil and paper. One develops a shorthand. Software is too slow and cumbersome, more like a prison to me: fixed relative note durations, time signatures, bar lines. No chance of quickly dropping to spare staves to notate an alternative (or more) when you want to keep the original just in case. No chance of creating a time line when I can’t decide how long duration I need a sound to be.

And then, humanising. My sample player has a few quite good features for that although I still find it easier in the daw to vary the dynamics, to get a rubato right, to work slightly off the grid and so on.

So unless I’m forced to upgrade for some reason I’ll give 5 and 5.1 a miss.

 

 

[David]

The upgrade from Dorico Pro 3.5 to 5 currently costs €159 until Jan 8th so nothing like as much as you were reading. Having said that, the biggest leap forward with Dorico was v3/3.5 without any doubt -- with this playback came alive and useful things like condensing (not for me as I barely use it) as well. v5 has focussed largely on playback which is fine for me with finally emulated gliss. now being possible and the various algorithms for dynamics have made some useful difference and reduced the time required for manual editing in the Key Editor which has anyway definitely improved regarding DAW features since v3. Still, everyone has his or her own gripes about what has not yet been implemented in notation -- my own is that doubling/halving note length still doesn't work properly with triplets -- can it be that hard?.... And filtering is still disorganised and lacks things like being able to choose a note range which is odd at this stage.  These two at least I could do in Sibelius five years ago.

For notation, the strongest feature of Dorico in my book is that it simply produces decent looking scores with virtually no effort which is what I personally want. Unlike what I was using before. I hardly ever use Engrave mode.

 

[Ivor]

Thank you for your detailed reply! It looks like if I can bear the tuplets voice changing messes then it hardly seems necessary to update to 5.1, considering it'll mean more arbitrary learning to do the same thing!

Yes. I never had any doubt that Dorico was the best and given what it has to do anyway to produce those nice looking and comprehensible scores, it's a bit of a miracle. I just have a general dislike for "creative marketing" - put out a flawed product to get it out there and rely on users to report back the flaws so it can be updated. Mr Gates started that. You'd think after about 40 years he could settle on a windows version and leave it except for security updates.

I still haven't mastered the general formatting principles of Dorico's Engrave mode master page editing, wishing it were simpler and jargon free. I've ended up printing off pages, altering them by hand then scanning them back in for the print shop to run off a copy.

I feel similarly over cutaway scores. What does it take to put a mask over unwanted portions of staves, allowing for a clef when they return into use?

Anyway, we can only do our best.

.

[David]

to be fair, no serious software-- especially in the field of music notation -- is without its flaws and the general support level through the forums led by Daniel Spreadbury is generally excellent (even if he can just occasionally get a bit touchy when Dorico is criticised, particularly over the intuitiveness of its interface which I'd be the first to admit is not the simplest). Compared with my first notation software, Overture, which introduces ever more bugs with every version and now seems to have stopped development altogether without a stable working version, the vast majority of the most serious ones in Dorico are quickly quashed. It's the grey area of certain things not working very well as opposed to clear bugs where needed action can sometimes be delayed.

Of course there's no need to upgrade versions if you don't feel the new one offers anything concrete, although it goes without saying that every sold copy helps fund further development.

I haven't bothered with master page editing and very likely I wouldn't understand it either. I'm afraid I probably pay too little attention to the engraving side, except for the rare occasions when something of mine is actually played by live musicians and stuff needs to be clear.