I belong to the older ones too (58) and learning Dorico is a good experience. Keeps the brain fresh.
58? ... still a pup.
I fired up the Dorico Pro (latest version) 30-day trial for the first time this week. I want to love Dorico, given that the playback features (my main concern with Sibelius .. as shared in a separate thread recently) seem better designed for driving modern VI libraries - but performance of this version is a problem. I think I will love Dorico when I learn it better, but as far as the playback features go, I'll be loving the next major version. [I'm happy to see there are expression maps, many imported from Cubase format, for many of the major libraries]
Below is what Steinberg replied to my first-impression issues (my email to them is below it). Of course, these playback concerns need to be tempered with all the many fine things people have already mentioned about Dorico.
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Hello Chris,
Thank you for providing your feedback about Dorico.
We are aware of the slow performance of the Mixer and improving that is something that we are hoping to address in our next major version; we understand the nature of the performance problem and have some ideas about how to solve it, so we are hopeful that we'll be able to improve this substantially soon.
There's a small bug in the UI of the Endpoint Setup dialog that means you cannot assign more than four ports at the moment, but this will certainly be addressed in our next release.
When you end up with just a number showing in the Endpoint Setup dialog instead of the name of an instrument, it's because that instrument is no longer found in the project. Although it would mean losing any other manual setup you may have done, you can resolve this by resetting the default playback template.
You can hide unused outputs for plug-ins using the options at the bottom of the Endpoint Setup dialog.
Improving the setup of complex playback templates involving third-party sound libraries is one of the chief focuses of the work we are doing on the playback side of the product in advance of the next major version, and I think you will find these improvements useful when they arrive in due course.
Steinberg Support
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My original email to Steinberg Support:
Subject: Dorico issues
Description: Hello,
I have recently downloaded the latest version of Dorico Pro 2 trial to determine if it can replace Sibelius for me. I have a moderately large score that I imported using MusicXML - 50 staves, 250 bars. I am driving eight VST instances of VE Pro which are talking to a slave system.
First of all let me compliment you on all the wonderful training videos - I've watched a lot and have many more to go.
Below are my issues and suggestions - please take these in the spirit of first impressions of how Dorico could make it easier for new users. I am investigating whether I can switch mainly due to the lack of DAW playback features in Sibelius - so my issues (so far) have nothing to do with notation/engraving and everything to do with driving a large slave template of Spitfire, Orchestral Tools, Cinematic Studio, etc. VI libraries.
Issues:
- Dorico seems to be very slow. I have a powerful Windows 7 PC with lots of memory and yet I am often (indeed, usually) waiting for the completion of simple interactions. The mixer is particularly slow. Dorico seems to be constantly saving a copy (slowly) which interrupts my progress.
- it seems I can specify a maximum of 4 devices for a Vienna Ensemble Pro VST instrument in the Endpoint dialog ... this is a bit restrictive.
- the Endpoint dialog (called from the VST rack) sometimes shows a number instead of an instrument name ... not sure why.
- I have not figured out the Mixer yet except that it seems particularly unusable for a few reasons:
+ unacceptably slow: horizontal scroll is very slow when there are many channels; audio latency (between hitting a note and seeing the level meter jump on the channel strip) is huge, totally non-realtime.
+ no control over hiding individual channel strips, except by type.
+ there seem to be many audio channels labeled "HSSE" that I don't use. I will not ever use the HALion libraries. If I add an instance of Kontakt 6 as a VST instrument into Dorico, then add extra outputs within Kontakt and route the loaded .nki instrument to the extra outputs, they seem to be routed to the HSSE2, HSSE3, etc. channels ... is this explained anywhere?
Suggestions:
- it is very inconvenient that I cannot rename instruments in the VST rack to say "Winds", "Brass", etc. instead of "Vienna Ensemble Pro" for all of them. I have eight VE Pro instruments and it is not always easy to tell which orchestral sections are attached to them - they appear identically in Dorico.
- Allow user-supplied names for each channel strip in the mixer. I particularly like the way Reaper handles track/channel display.
- it seems the Endpoint dialog would be a good place to select/specify the instrument linkage ... but you cannot do it there, you can just set the Expression Map. If nothing else, give a message on how to do it.
- if you require me to establish a time signature before creating new bars, don't just silently not do it - tell me.
Any helpful suggestions would be appreciated,