Right now, I earn my living setting music for pubishers, mostly parts. I need to use whatever software I am told to use. At the moment, composers are sending their scores to the publishers mostly in Finale and Sibelius, but with the recent sunset of Finale, I decided that it was time to give Dorico an honest look. I have many composer friends who love it, and swear by it.
Just to give you a little background. I was a beta tester for Finale for many years, from v. 3.5 to 2011. At the same time, the engraving company for which I worked was the European distributor of Score, so I did some testing of v. 4 and the never-really-finished Windows version. Also, at the time we were talking with the Finn brothers about Sibelius. We were one of the original "Sibelius Centres" in the UK, although that scheme didn't last long. It meant, at least, we were close to the development of the early version of Sibelius, although not directly involved.
When rumors of Dorico surfaced, I was all-in, offering my services for testing. I could never get the alpha versions to work on my computer and eventually gave up trying, deciding to wait for a mature version to be released. I finally sprang for v. 4 when it came out, and just didn't have time to really learn it properly. None of my publishers were using it, and I was too busy to take time out of earning money to spend significant time on it. When the Finale sunset announcement was made, I decided to get my act together, upgrading to v. 5. One of the main composers that I work on was a Finale user, and I wanted to be ready for her to switch to Dorico. I have since learned that she is switching to Sibelius instead, and, knowing her, I think that is the right choice. She doesn't have the time to learn a complex program like Dorico. Nevertheless, I decided to press on, so I could have Dorico in my arsenal for future work.
Whenever I've learned a new program, the best method to begin with was to take an existing score and edit it. I did that with Score, as well as Sibelius. I started with Finale, so that wasn't relevant. I promptly created a musicXML file of the trumpet concerto I had just completed in Sibelius and ported it into Dorico to clean up and extract parts.
I quickly learned that was a mistake. Nothing was working, and I just couldn't get what I wanted at all. OK, I decided to go back and input a piece from scratch. I work with complex music, and I write it as well. I decided that since I had never set my String Quartet No 3, I would work on that. Aside from having a lot of glissandi and quarter-tones, it was relatively simple music. After 8 hours of work, I had input a system and a half of music - simple music at that. At that speed, I thought it would be Christmas before I finished it. Of course, with Dorico, it isn't done until it is done. They recommend that you input the entire score before you clean it up. The quarter-tones were impenetrable. You have to do it in a specific order for it to work, and that wasn't apparent on the forum, until somebody gave me the steps in order and told me that the order was important.
That is one of the big things about Dorico. The order is important. Don't start cleaning up your score until you have it all in or you will mess things up later. That's annoying.
I needed to speed up. I started over and set a couple of pages of Beethoven's Op 18 No 1 String Qt. I expected it to go quickly, since I taught it in my engraving classes, and could do it there in about a half hour, fully narrated and with questions. It took me two hours to set in Dorico, but I knew I could get faster with practice. I went back to my quartet, and yes, I speeded up, although I kept running into difficulties. My biggest hangup was how Dorico treated slurs and dotted notes. The automatic settings didn't work for me. If I could get dotted quarters to work the way I wanted them, then dotted halves didn't. Again, forcing values requires you to do it in a certain order, otherwise, it doesn't stick. Eventually, I got all the music in: 140-ish bars of quartet in about 2 weeks. (I probably could have done it in Sibelius in 3 days or less.)
Once it was all input, I could go to Engrave mode and clean it up, and that was OK. Parts seemed to work OK, but there wasn't anything difficult there. It didn't need any cues, and there was enough slack for good page turns without starting the part on p. 2 or anything like that. They were only 3 or 4 pages long. It looks good, but not any better than Sibelius.
Then there was playback. The native sounds seemed a little artificial, but better than Sibelius'. I like that the quarter-tones were native, although starting a gliss on a quarter-tone didn't usually work. Also, glissandi wider than a step are ... stepped. You can't smoothly gliss wide intervals. It was the same problem with NotePerformer, whether I used the native sounds or the playback engine. I had some problems early on with NP4, but then they worked themselves out. I'm not sure what happened. They didn't work right, and then they did, and actually it sounds pretty good, except for the wider glissandi.
Dorico doesn't have export to scrolling video for playback, although you can use 3rd party software to capture it. (I suspect the files will be larger than Sibelius.)
I have posted the resultiing sound file with NP4 and Spitfire Audio BBSCO Pro in the music area. (BBCSO Core doesn't have the solo strings.) Have a listen.
Going back to that concerto that I converted? Well, that is a nightmare. Something went wrong in the conversion and the default bracketing doesn't work correctly. I'm also having problems setting it up for parts retrospectively, since I consolidated some parts in Sibelius, and for Dorico to work correctly, you want them on separate staves, so Dorico can consolidate automatically. I have the Dorico people looking at it, since it isn't working as designed. I'm between a rock and a hard place with it. I can't move forward until I have an answer.
The bottom line is that if you input in Dorico in the proper way - the way they want you to - you should get along OK. What scares me right now is that there are so many weird key combinations that are different from both Finale and Sibelius, I will probably forget them if I don't continue using the program every day. What is even more scary is that I rely on the composers to input things correctly when I do their parts, and if I have to reconstruct a usable file to extract their parts, it may take me longer to produce them. I have working routines to do that for Finale and Sibelius quickly, but at this point I can't begin to see the problems in Dorico, especially if they have converted a file from mXML.
After 3 weeks with Sibelius, I was a pro user. After 4 weeks with Dorico, I am still very much an amateur, and I couldn't honestly say that I know the program well enough to tell you whether or not I prefer it to the others. That might take another 6 months.
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a very interesting post on Dorico which does chime with what at least one or two others have said. It might actually be worth putting these observations on the forum -- or perhaps you have already as there's such a volume now, I couldn't possibly read everything. Certainly, Dorico is designed to work out all the formatting automatically for you and it's great when it works which for me it does most of the time as I'm not too demanding but if it doesn't you're usually best just changing some (usually hard to find) formatting parameters globally and watch it get everything right -- or not as the case may be. For a composer like me, particularly because of the infinitely more sophisticated playback support than the competition, it's certainly the right choice. For an engraver, I'm less sure but I guess you can get used to just about anything given time.
As soon as I learned that Finale was 'pining for the fjords,' I made backups of the installation files. Then I downloaded the free version of Dorico. I tried it but went straight back to Finale. I'm already old, so I guess I'll make it to the end with my trusted software.
You make a living setting music for publishers? You poor man. I can't even set my own music without getting a bit drunk first.
I couldn't imagine for a moment setting music for publishers. I let Dorico set mine and blame it when it's unreadable mess.
These days, it is mostly parts. Composers don't want to do their own parts, and many don't know how. Many are keyboard players, and don't know what orchestral or band players need - how much time, how many cues, what cues ...
When Finale first came out (along with Nightingale), one of my publishers in the UK bought each of their composers (except for the elderly famous ones) copies of the software and a computer to run it on. They soon found that what they got back was a mess. I remember the first one I encountered was Magnus Lindberg's Coyote Blues. (I know and adore Magnus, but it is true.) The publisher wanted the score lightly cleaned up and parts. I don't remember if an editor looked at it before I received it, but I suspect not. It was a complete mess. I had to spend hours cleaning up the score before I could even consider parts, and the publisher ended up spending the same amount as the would have if I had set the parts in the first place.
Oddly enough, I played the piece about 10 years later, and he must have revised it, since the new parts I played from were awful.
The publishers quickly learned not to trust the notational skills of their composers, and either immediately sent the scores to me for cleanup or had me set new ones. As an editor and an engraver, I see different things than a composer would. Composers are generally concerned with how it sounds and not how it looks or how easy it is to read. (There are exceptions, of course, and some have a non-standard world view of how it should look.) When I look at some of the arrangements and compositions posted on IMSLP, I usually gasp at how poor they look, and the parts are even worse. Some are even published!
I admit that as a composer, I get to a certain point in the process and can't be bothered to give my scores a real publisher edit. It is hard to change caps. At least, as a professional engraver, it starts from an acceptable point stylistically. What bothers me is that software like Dorico, and before it, Sibelius, try to take notational issues out of the hands of composers. They insist they know what is right, and if your house style differs from Dorico (esp.), you have to jump through hoops to get what you want. Some things you can change globally; some you can't. In Sibelius, you can make global changes, but if you manually change something, it stays. Dorico has a habit of undoing it.
Most of the publishers I work for want dotted quarters on the beat, but divide the beat if it starts off the beat. To get that in Dorico, you have to either force it manually or change two global settings for dotted notes. The second of these also breaks dotted half notes, which in this house style are allowed. In my quartet, I had a lot of each, and to complicate matters, I also had to force a lot of note values to get my glissandi to work correctly. I don't like that Dorico treats notes that are tied as single notes, so if you have a string of tied notes, you select one, and then it defaults to the first one, so you have to scroll the cursor to the note you want. You can see in the example below that this piece has a lot of tied notes, a few less than there should be because of playback issues (see bb 11-12). I had to break the notes for the gliss. to work in playback. Also, you can't tie from a tremolo to a normal note. It loses the tremolo in playback. I'm hoping that this png file shows with a white background. Sorry if it doesn't.
The vertical spacing of the system below is the default spacing, which is incorrect. There is too much space between Violin II and Viola. It has to do with the stacked molto vibr., which it gives too much space when it doesn't need it. I'm not sure why it is better between the Viola and Cello. You'll also notice a descrepancy between the sizes of the default text non vib. and the added text molto vibr. (I prefer the r, but Dorico was ignoring it on playback if it had the r.) I can't seem to get the two to match, since the sizes are allocated in different places, and I need to deal with relative sizes. I had a hell of a time getting the left hand pizz in b. 16 Cello to be a dotted half, but eventually I got it to work. I was also never sure whether to pick a 3-beam or 4 beam tremolo on tied notes. I never seemed to get the ones I wanted. I really hate haven't to switch back and forth between modes. That was something that Finale fixed surruptitiously over the years. It was never a problem in Sibelius. I also don't like that hitting the ESC key doesn't always release selected notes.
Anyway, I was talking about engraving for a living, and have rambled on...
Always heartening to read that Most Composers Suck At Engraving. It's a surprise to me, despite the awful scores and parts I've seen on here (and contributed to myself, if that makes anyone feel less insulted) but my focus has always been to be able to do it myself and every recording/performance has been from scores and parts created personally. I spend more time millimetrically moving symbols and adjusting tiny details than I do composing, and I've seen professionally engraved scores with issues that I wouldn't have allowed out - generally cosmetic issues and collisions, which is probably why they were left, but I want my stuff to be as perfect as I can reasonably achieve. Partially for playability and confidence from players, and partially so conductors' and directors' first impressions are of someone who cares and hasn't fallen into all the usual self-engraving traps.
See, over the years I've come to the conclusion that notation should be separate from playback. That is, what should be printed in the score / parts should be considered as a separate thing from what you'll use to create the audio playback. There are things I'd do only in the printed score, but for playback I'd do something else completely.
My go-to notation program is Lilypond, which IMO produces superior typesetting. But its playback sucks unless you do infelicitous things to the score that you wouldn't do in a score meant for human players to read. So my solution is to tag certain things as printed score only, and certain things as midi-only.
For example, in my more recent fugues the dynamics in the printed score are completely "fake", in the sense that they are completely ignored by the playback. For playback, I use a completely independent set of dynamics that spell out to the dumb computer what a human player would have already understood from context, and also uses f, ff, fff, ffff, fffff to fine tune volumes where in the score I restrict myself to a maximum of ff, relying on the player to judge from context what I mean. (Think about it: the computer doesn't know how to play a crescendo properly unless you spell out the exact dynamic levels to start/end with. A human player can often figure out the right thing to do from context, and would find it annoying if you cluttered the score with overly detailed dynamics that he's not going to be able to read at playing speed. To get an expressive playback you may need to spell out "emotional dynamics" for the computer; for the human a single word suffices, and indeed any more than that would actually hinder a good interpretation.)
So I actually think of "playback score" and "printed score" as two completely separate entities. They only happen to describe the same logical piece of music, but are otherwise independent things.
I create a clean score using Finale for the PDF (I sell sheet music). Then I work on a separate version for playback, which is just a demo. I don't aim to make the sound file feel 'real.'
When I was young, you would go to the shop and look for an interesting score. There was a piano there in case you needed to hear the music, but most customers could hear the music just by reading it. Nowadays, players seem to need an audio example. I'm not sure how that happened. I suppose things have gotten too easy.
In Sibelius, I often create a playback score, although recently I haven't needed to. With NotePerformer I can get a high quality playback without having to resort to going to a DAW to create a playback. Those days when you go to a music store to find a score are gone. Potential performers seem to want to hear a high-quality demo before they choose a piece.
As far as Lilypond is concerned, I don't see the attraction. Firstly, no publisher has asked me to use it, and secondly, as a former Score user, I don't think a modern notation program needs text entry like that. Score looked better, and I can still use it in DosBox, if I need to. Yes, one has more control - and I prefer having control - but I've stopped setting my scores in Score even though they look better in the long term, partly because of the archaic method of extracting parts and the lack of playback facility. With Sibelius, I can do in a day what took me a week in Score, and if you set your defaults right, it will look nearly as good, and you can tweak as needed. Dorico is even more default-driven and such tweaking is more difficult and time-consuming, but I'm still learning it. There are things I like, and things I absolutely hate. I should also admit that I was that way when I learned Sibelius.
It happened because the technology to create a fairly realistic audio sample improved dramatically and quickly enough that there is really no reason *not* to include one, especially for new or little-known works.