Steinberg Dorico 6 Released

[Duncan Krummel]

Dorico 6 just dropped, and has a few new handy features, as well as a few I’m not as excited for. Which, I suppose, is about as much as one can hope for from any update.

New in 6:

PROOFREADING
Dorico automatically checks your score as you edit, highlighting issues that could raise questions in rehearsal and recording sessions in the new Proofreading panel

CUTAWAYS
Create cutaway scores that match the finest published works of Lutosławski, Ligeti, Berio and Stravinsky in a single click.

CYCLE PLAYBACK
Loop any section of your score during playback, and hear your edits live in the next cycle.

CHORD SYMBOLS
Show multiple rows of chord symbols, with optional extender lines. Create your own custom chord symbols, and easily override every aspect of their appearance.

FILL VIEW
Fill view makes maximum use of your available display, flexibly flowing as many systems of music as possible into the width and height of the window.

OPENTYPE FEATURES
Access enhanced typographical control with full support for OpenType glyph positioning and glyph substitution features.

SYSTEM-ATTACHED ITEMS
Exercise complete control over where tempos, rehearsal marks, repeats, and large time signatures appear.

FLOW HEADING OVERRIDES
Flow headings provide automatic titles before each new song, movement or piece in your project: now you can control exactly how they appear on every page in every layout.

RULERS AND GRID
Show rulers and a customizable grid in page view for precision control over item placement.

CONDENSING
All instruments held by players can now be condensed, instead of only the first, making it easy to handle players who double.

JUMP BAR
Every one of Dorico’s thousands of options is now at your fingertips via the jump bar, so you can find and change any setting simply by typing one or two keywords.

MARCHING PERCUSSION BASICS
All the essential sounds you need for marching snares, cymbals, toms, and bass drums, in partnership with Tapspace, makers of Virtual Drumline.

LIBRARY MANAGER
Easily import options into all layouts and flows, making it the work of moments to conform a project to your preferred settings.

USER SETTINGS IMPORT AND EXPORT
Easily move all your customizations to Dorico from one computer to another with import and export of all your user settings.

LINES - TAPERED CURVES
Create custom lines using curves, allowing you to create curved arrows, braces, and other similar shapes.

IMPORT AND EXPORT - MUSIC XML
Improved export of guitar tablature, better handling of transposed instruments, lyric font support, and more.

PROPERTIES FILTERING
Use the keyboard to access the Properties panel filter, and show properties for all selected items for power user control.

MARGIN CONTROL
Show staff labels outside the left page margin, allowing consistent control over the precise width of every system, as preferred by some publishers.

STAFF LABELS
Selectively hide or show player group labels on any system, and show group labels even when individual staves show no labels

EASY EDITING
Double-click staff labels and player group labels to directly edit instrument and player group names. Double-click Project Info placeholders to directly edit title, composer, lyricist and copyright information.

VIEW OPTIONS
Use the new View Options dialog to set your own preferred options for every new project, with all relevant settings at your fingertips.

TEMPO
Tempo marks can now have a different relative size in full score and part layouts, and you have greater control over how gradual tempos and metronome marks appear.

REFINED HANDLES
When you zoom in, frame outlines, handles, and other non-printing items are proportionally smaller, obscuring the notation less, and making finer Engrave mode edits easier.

STATUS BAR
The information read-out in the status bar is enriched, with page, timecode, and harmony descriptions.

BARLINES
If one system ends with a double barline, show a double barline at the start of the following system.

VIDEO
Videos using HDR color look better by default on sRGB displays, and playback performance is improved.

USER INTERFACE - DARK MODE
Dorico’s visual appearance can optionally automatically follow the operating system light and dark themes.


https://www.steinberg.net/dorico/

Upgrade from 5 Pro: $99.99
Upgrade to 6 Pro from 4/5/6 Elements: $479.99
Upgrade to 6 Elements from 4/5 Elements: $29.99

Pro 6: $579.99
Elements 6: $99.99

Overview of workflow improvements:

[Luke]

Looks like a solid update, thanks for posting. What are the features you aren't excited about?

[Duncan Krummel]

Cycle Playback doesn’t really fit how I work when writing, and the added marching band sounds aren’t really useful to me either. Unless Noteperformer receives a massive update to sound, I’m not too concerned about playback. Even then, unless Dorico allows importing of tempo maps (I’m unaware of it if they do already), the playback is just too quantized. Supporting OpenType isn’t of use to me, and I don’t use video in Dorico ever. Finally, I’m not sure I’ll find the proofreading feature that useful, at least insofar as it makes suggestions on how quickly a performer can change instruments, or placement of elements such as dynamics. YMMV, of course, but I’d rather use my own experience and understanding to make those decisions. Still, none of these are issues for me, and I’m sure many will appreciate their inclusion.

I am very excited about the cutaways, though, which includes a new feature to add coordination lines, as they’re calling them, between bar lines/notes. That alone is a huge time saver, and will finally let me re-engrave some old Sibelius-made pieces of mine in Dorico. Also the grid lines will be a great help.

I’ll have to explore the other additions when I can to see how useful they’ll be, but overall I’m fairly pleased with this upgrade.

[RobS]

thank you for the heads up, Duncan! I will soon update from 5pro, though 99€ is just a bit steep honestly. The cutaways appeal to me, for the kind of scores I have to work on, but overall I find the program a mess, it's become a jungle of menus on various levels and I never understood some of the initial choices they made, including the idea of flows and the way they create nested folders when you export files. Probably it's just an incompatibility between the way my brain works and the program.

[Markus K]

Changing titles and fonts by double clicking in the score is nice I find. It always felt a bit complicated to search for the right menu especially in the beginning before you become used to the workflow. Changing chord symbols to my liking used to drive me crazy. And being able to use more custom keycommands for often used items might be of help too. I remember missing some when switching from Sibelius and the popovers made up for that only partly.

They really go in fast pace with Dorico. Doesn't feel that long ago since v5 came along.

[Duncan Krummel]

I'm taking a first stab at the re-engraving I mentioned, and it's already proving to be a headache; not specifically Dorico's fault, but Sibelius being a much more drag-and-drop type of graphical editor means I made some non-transferrable choices to achieve the appearance I was going for. I'm going to have to really think hard about how to translate it. It's also probably going to require a fair bit of custom creation of noteheads and playing techniques to get where I want to go. Sheesh.

Rob, I agree the $99 was a bit of a tough one, personal finances being what they are. It's one of the few things I've spent money on lately, though, so I bit the bullet. The added features seemed worthy enough, imo. I do agree that the menus can be a bit hard to get around, but the jump bar, key command J, is useful for finding things quickly, if you know the right terminology to use. I also agree that the flows aren't a perfect solution.

My biggest gripe with it right now is that header changes don't stick with flows, so if I reorganize a set of songs, for instance, I have to manually reset the starting pages to the First Page header template, and same thing with resetting page numbers to 1 for each song. Seems a simple thing to fix to me, but I'm not much of a coder to say the least. Scratch that, I just figured out how to work around this!

[Duncan Krummel]

Having spent some time with it, I think 6 is a worthy upgrade. The newly included music and text fonts, Sebastian and Splentino respectively, have replaced November2 and Quicksand (a weird choice, I know, but I was being consistent across website/engraving/etc.) for me. Except for the dynamics. November2's are contentious, but I quite like them. I tried keeping the accidentals from November2 as well, since I prefer the look, but they are too thin when coupled with Sebastian, so I reverted back.

The proofread feature is still not 100% my cup of tea, but I'm thankful for its ability to point out duplicated clefs, dynamics, and similar issues for review. Still working to re-engrave the piece that would make use of Cutaways, so haven't tested that out yet.

[RobS]

Having spent some time with it, I think 6 is a worthy upgrade. The …….

[Markus K]

[/i] Scratch that, I just figured out how to work around this!

How?

[Daryl]

Even then, unless Dorico allows importing of tempo maps (I’m unaware of it if they do already), the playback is just too quantized.

Dorico has always allowed importing of tempo maps You just import a MIDI file. Done.

[Duncan Krummel]

How?

Layout Options > Page Setup > Flows > Use 'First' page template: Any flow starting at top of page

Dorico has always allowed importing of tempo maps You just import a MIDI file. Done.

Daryl, thanks for pointing this out. I've never been able to get MIDI import to work very well, but I'll have to try again in 6 to see. Although, I'll admit at the point I'm designing a tempo map in a DAW, I'm usually past the point of interest in working with notation playback.

Actually, what I'd really love to see is a program that will analyze my playing and derive a tempo map from that. Logic has a feature somewhat there, with beat mapping, but it still requires a heavy handed involvement, and misses much of the subtlety in a performance.

[Markus K]

How?

Layout Options > Page Setup > Flows > Use 'First' page template: Any flow starting at top of page

Thank you, that I know already. Hoped for something more easy.

Actually, what I'd really love to see is a program that will analyze my playing and derive a tempo map from that. Logic has a feature somewhat there, with beat mapping, but it still requires a heavy handed involvement, and misses much of the subtlety in a performance.

You probably do that but I find recording your playing in the DAW before working on notation does work well. I do that a lot. In Cubase it is relatively easy to create a Tempo map with the time Warp tool from your playing. Depending how complex and long it is takes maybe 15 to 30min or less. Then export midi. If you have a lot of instruments you don't want in the notation program you can just create one long midi note for the whole piece and import just that to Dorico.

In the meantime with CB 14 you can even create a Dorico project directly in CB to export which is super convenient.

[Daryl]

Daryl, thanks for pointing this out. I've never been able to get MIDI import to work very well, but I'll have to try again in 6 to see.

It should be easy.

File
Import
Tempo track

Then just point it at your MIDI file.

If this doesn't' work, maybe post a short video and hopefully I'll be able to see where you're going wrong