Dorico 5 is here! And I’m here, but not to tell you about all the new features. That’s the job of the folks over at Scoring Notes. No, I’m here to tell you what I think is relevant to other band directors.
The headlining features of Dorico 5 are probably the Space templates and Stage template. I’ll be honest, I don’t get out of bed in the morning for the Play Mode enhancements, however neat they are. As long as NotePerformer is working, I’m great. (NotePerformer 4 just came out, by the way!) The new Stage templates and Space templates, and the new ‘pitch contour emphasis’ are all impressive features I’m sure for a certain crowd, but not me. If you’re not already using NotePerformer, I’m sure these are some nice enhancements, and they’ll be nice for people whose needs surpass NotePerformer too (though with that new version, that’s a lot fewer people!) Maybe this’ll compliment NotePerformer too?
The team at Steinberg are responsible for making a product used by people of all sorts of backgrounds. Not every feature is going to rock my world as an educator.
So what is there to be excited about from my eyes? First, I do want to establish this a lighter release compared to how massive versions 4, 3.5, 3, and 2 were. Now, I’d wager that the team behind Dorico, who drops very big and very impressive features in point releases probably has more planned for the 5.0 life cycle1. But I need to bring up a cardinal point of making software purchasing decisions: You can not spend money on what software might be able to do down the road, you need to buy it based on what it can do today. If you don’t think 5.0 is worth your money today, and if the team and Dorico were kidnapped by a James Bond supervillian (they are in England after all) then you don’t get to be mad if you buy it and it doesn’t add the new feature you want. If 5.1 comes out and adds hardware support for toasters with adaptive slots to print music on toast, and that’s the feature you really want to see Dorico release, then you can buy it when 5.1 comes out.
That said, I think there’s some neat stuff in 5.0
This wouldn’t be supremely exciting to most people, but the Instrument Editor is exactly what I’ve been waiting for from Steinberg. This is a lot like the Score Manager in Finale or the “edit instruments” dialogs in Sibelius. Setup Mode has previously allowed users to redefine instrument names, but the Instrument Editor gives all the flexibility one could desire.
After much more granular control over handling of instrument names, there are options for customizing the staff handling (allowing for greater flexibility for existing percussion instruments among other things). The ability to (re)define the instrument’s range for out-of-range alerts is nice, but the transposition controls are the biggest deal to me. Beyond defining custom transpositions for notes, the default transposition of an instrument can be changed. Our long national nightmare of typing in “Euphonium” in the instrument picker in setup mode and having to use the mouse to change it from a treble clef transposition should be finally over – May being as busy as it is, I haven’t figured out how to implement this. I am happy to report, though, that layout names now respect the “Never show transposition” option if you have it enabled. I can now get “Clarinet” instead of “Clarinet in B♭” as the normal title on my parts.
Beyond the instrument editor, there’s a lot of other features that are quite nice. There’s the addition of a lot of new music fonts2, and some changes to the logic of how text fonts are handled that means everyone should see the “Font Replacement” dialog upon opening a project a lot less. Unless that’s just me that gets that all the time.3
There’s some notation updates that I won’t notice every day but are still nice. Among them are some changes to the logic of note grouping for cut time, notably allowing cut time to inherit the engraving options for common time (which will save a lot of manual beam grouping when in cut time personally!) There’s some serious investment into MusicXML import and export which will further clean up some transposition labels for instruments (Steinberg’s quote is that you will no longer see things like “Clarinet in Bb in B♭.”)
For any educators who have students using Dorico, you’ll be interested to know both SE (free) and Elements get some love on this release. Both see their player limits expand – SE goes from 2 to 8, and Elements no longer has a limit of players. The free version of Dorico for iPad is also seeing this limit raise to 8 (or 12 with a Steinberg account). This’ll make student use of Dorico much more practical; I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about student use of notation software (as a hobby) and MuseScore’s impressive version 4 had changed that calculus a lot. It’s nice to see Dorico make improvments to SE. For what it’s worth, Elements also sees some font and engraving improvements from its current form.
- Playback scrubbing
- Multiple item creation
There’s also mouse editing features that have been added. You can drag notes to change them. It’s one more way to make edits, and it leverages the rhythmic grid well. It’s obviously not as fast as other methods, but if you’re watching West Coast baseball at 11:00 at night local time and you’re tweaking some parts half-awake, it might be a neat way to do so. Hypothetically. But this is a rough year for the Giants, so you should probably just go to bed and finish this in the morning.
I’ll mention this release also has some design changes to playback scrubbing and multiple item creation. I’ll refer again to the Scoring Notes article for more detail on these.
Dorico 5 is a nice update. I won’t lie that I’m hoping to see more substantial and appealing features in the upcoming point releases than 5.0 itself launched, but I also don’t want to sell the hard work on these features short just because they’re not the things I get most excited about.
Footnotes
-
Steinberg publishes both their own blog updates and comprehensive release notes for every update, but I feel that the folks at Scoring Notes do a better job of capturing what’s most compelling there, and are more willing to point out just how impressive Steinberg has been on some of the things. ↩
-
At a glance, these seem to be fonts that are freely available from other sources (like Finale’s fonts you can get by installing even the trial of Finale v27), but it saves a lot of work and headache having these bundled in ↩
-
I have some cheap Adobe subscription primarily for getting access to Adobe Fonts. I like them, but the way Adobe makes me manage them is painful, and maybe related to this dialog. ↩