Dorico

I have been using Dorico Elements for a year or so. Having found Sibelius impenetrable years ago, Notion not full-featured enough, and Guitar Pro too limited for general composition work (I had used Musescore many years ago, so did not consider it when starting to score more seriously), I'm now at the point where, preparing a musical for publication, the limitations of Dorico Elements are becoming very apparent. Cost has stopped me upgrading to Pro.

Only 12 instruments, or players. No engraving editing options etc.

I have to say at first I found Dorico very powerful, and fairly easy to get around, or at least to find the ways to get around, whereas my memory of Sib was of searching fruitlessly for different options that in my view should have been grouped together. However, I keep running into limitations of the Elements version (I'm not methodical enough to keep a record of these!) and thought I'd give Musescore another try after reading something on the Dorico forum that basically accused Musescore of nicking a lot of ideas from Dorico....!

I was expecting to have to shell out for the Dorico Pro version (when they next had a promotional discount) BUT I seriously doubt I will do that now.

Musescore so far is more than meeting my expectations - there are a few buggy quirks that I'm coming across (hide empty staves, then un-hide, and they don't all reappear, for one), but overall I am seriously impressed. With the expectations of Version 4 and more DAW type integration I'm almost certain that paying out cash I do not have for Dorico Pro ain't going to happen.

So, is there any meaning to "professional level" scoring software? Well, perhaps in this day and age where everyone in the software business is standing on the shoulders of those who came before - perhaps not. Of course Musescore has to be paid for, and I'm very curious as to how it is able to develop without a so-called corporate structure and profit driven motive etc. But as a life-long socialist, I see no problem with the concept of a socially / community owned software code. It does, however, bring up the whole question of intellectual property & copyright etc - and as a struggling composer songwriter whose royalties barely pay my winter fuel bill - I of course would be reluctant to give away all my intellectual property. Although, in this digital age, Spotify and a million other podcasters and online radio stations are using our creativity without fair payment, so in a way we've already given it away.

It may be that Musescore is a bit of an exception - though Open Office can certainly give Word & Pages a run for their money. Maybe we're at a time where there's so much knowledge in the community (knowledge that was once highly specialised) that we should expect even more fully functional "free" software to emerge. Perhaps it's only the grand monopolies of Microsoft and Apple that is holding this back, and, rather like the notorious "in app purchases" of i and android apps, the future business is in the "enhanced & user specific" applications of the software - not the core functionality.

Discuss!

Of course one can achieve excellent results in nearly every program. The question is how much extra work is required.

That example on the Dorico Wikipedia page is really horrible. Several of us were commenting on the forum about it last week. It certainly shouldn’t be the representative example being used for Dorico!

In Dorico the person didn't finish the sample. One just has to select the notes of particular voice and hit the key to change the direction of the stems.

Personally the sounds of the scoring software are secondary - if I wanted to create realistic (as far as that goes!) sounding orchestral music I'd use a DAW with a decent sample library like Miroslav or BBC etc.

For me scoring software is for creating scores that will be read by real musicians - so the sounds are only as a guide during the writing process. That said, I'll be happy if V4 supports VSTi and Note Performer.

Actually I loathe most movie soundtracks due to the (lazy, preset out of the box) use of VSTi's - always the same "dramatic" tropes, always in friggin' A minor!

Wherever possible I use real musicians. If we don't write for real musicians don't surprised if there aren't any around in the future.....