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Dorico -> Sibelius?

Pick your poison

  • Dorico forever

    Votes: 61 74.4%

  • Sibelius is cool

    Votes: 21 25.6%
  • Total voters
    82
Sibelius hasn't had an update since November. They have a skeleton crew, so that upper management at Avid can pull in those 7 figure salaries. As a result, very little gets done. There's a lot of talk i.e. "that's on our list" but bugs don't get fixed and progress can be very slow at times.
 
Sibelius just got updated, but it looks like a small update. I got an email that 2024.3 is out, and it looks like it has a couple of new features, but nothing groundbreaking. Workflow improvements (EDIT: for Pro Tools users, which I'm not) and resizable UI elements, but nothing musical that I can see. It seems like they're just barely keeping it afloat at this point.
 
Ashley Kampta said:
Sibelius just got updated, but it looks like a small update. .
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The keypad can be resized, which is good (and overdue). Midi can be copy/pasted from Sibelius to PT and the opposite. I don't know if that works with other DAWS, I haven't had any luck.
There's some improvement using Stream Deck if one wants to pay $30. So yeah, basically the keypad is the big thing unless one uses PT.
 
So in a surprising turn of events, after a few weeks of trying out Sibelius Ultimate side by side with Dorico, I’m having a much easier and faster time with Sibelius for my use cases. Both have strengths and limitations, but I have been able to learn Sibelius way faster than I thought and there’s an immediacy to it that I’m really appreciating (much fewer steps to do the things I need to do repeatedly). So much so, that I’ve mostly migrated over due to getting frustrated or slowed down in Dorico. Not something I expected to happen.
 
ALittleNightMusic said:
So in a surprising turn of events, after a few weeks of trying out Sibelius Ultimate side by side with Dorico, I’m having a much easier and faster time with Sibelius for my use cases. Both have strengths and limitations, but I have been able to learn Sibelius way faster than I thought and there’s an immediacy to it that I’m really appreciating (much fewer steps to do the things I need to do repeatedly). So much so, that I’ve mostly migrated over due to getting frustrated or slowed down in Dorico. Not something I expected to happen.
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I'm curious, what are your use cases?

Me and most composers I know IRL (we all primarily write concert music) use Sibelius. Dorico seems like the "default" notation software here, which is obvious seeing as it has better ways for plugging in sample libraries and the ability to write "piano roll style" in Play mode. For composing directly with notation, I always felt Sibelius is quicker and more intuitive.

I guess I'm biased, sort of being a Sibelius veteran at this point (ca 15 years now), but it's interesting to see that your experience with these softwares is very similar to mine and most of my friends who tried Dorico. It gives me hope that it's not only a matter of me "getting old".
 
syrinx said:
I guess I'm biased, sort of being a Sibelius veteran at this point
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Not being a veteran in any of these, I regretted buying Dorico 1 since the stuff I liked the most in S. wasn’t in D.

Sibelius is named after a composer. Dorico is named after an engraver, isn’t it? Maybe that (and that D. possibly has the most stubborn developers) explains why D. still lacks some of the best stuff in S. Too bad there isn’t a crossgrade discount from D to S.

Of course, D has great stuff S doesn't have too.
 
Vik said:
Not being a veteran in any of these, I regretted buying Dorico 1 since the stuff I liked the most in S. wasn’t in D.

Sibelius is named after a composer. Dorico is named after an engraver, isn’t it? Maybe that (and that D. possibly has the most stubborn developers) explains why D. still lacks some of the best stuff in S. Too bad there isn’t a crossgrade discount from D to S.

Of course, D has great stuff S doesn't have too.
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I started with Sibelius in 1993, but have now switched 100% to Dorico. There are a few things I miss from Sibelius, but these are more than compensated for by Dorico's superior way of handling many other things. I'd be interested to know what "best stuff" Dorico doesn't have, because most of the things I miss are relatively trivial.
 
Vik said:
Too bad there isn’t a crossgrade discount from D to S.
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Are you sure? Their “competitive crossgrade” page doesn’t mention Dorico (only Finale, Notion, Encore and Mosaic!) but perhaps it’s out of date? Clicking on the buy-it-here link takes you to a page about some trade show! I’m not sure which I find harder to understand - Avid’s licensing system or Dorico playback.
 
ALittleNightMusic said:
So in a surprising turn of events, after a few weeks of trying out Sibelius Ultimate side by side with Dorico, I’m having a much easier and faster time with Sibelius for my use cases. Both have strengths and limitations, but I have been able to learn Sibelius way faster than I thought and there’s an immediacy to it that I’m really appreciating (much fewer steps to do the things I need to do repeatedly). So much so, that I’ve mostly migrated over due to getting frustrated or slowed down in Dorico. Not something I expected to happen.
Click to expand...
The "much fewer steps" thing has come up before, but I haven't been convinced that it isn't usually just not knowing how to do something efficiently in Dorico. Can you suggest an example or two?
 
ALittleNightMusic said:
So in a surprising turn of events, after a few weeks of trying out Sibelius Ultimate side by side with Dorico, I’m having a much easier and faster time with Sibelius for my use cases. Both have strengths and limitations, but I have been able to learn Sibelius way faster than I thought and there’s an immediacy to it that I’m really appreciating (much fewer steps to do the things I need to do repeatedly). So much so, that I’ve mostly migrated over due to getting frustrated or slowed down in Dorico. Not something I expected to happen.
Click to expand...
Hopefully you won’t have too many cases where you have to prepare parts. Sibelius was awfully behind Dorico in that regard. From my experience using both.
 
syrinx said:
I'm curious, what are your use cases?

Me and most composers I know IRL (we all primarily write concert music) use Sibelius. Dorico seems like the "default" notation software here, which is obvious seeing as it has better ways for plugging in sample libraries and the ability to write "piano roll style" in Play mode. For composing directly with notation, I always felt Sibelius is quicker and more intuitive.

I guess I'm biased, sort of being a Sibelius veteran at this point (ca 15 years now), but it's interesting to see that your experience with these softwares is very similar to mine and most of my friends who tried Dorico. It gives me hope that it's not only a matter of me "getting old".
Click to expand...
I’m only writing concert works as well and have moved to Dorico for anything that needs to be performed. Its part and performance cue features alone eclipse my experiences working with Sibelius. To each their own however. Just wanted to say Dorico doesn’t just appeal to film score people. :)
 
Daryl said:
I'd be interested to know what "best stuff" Dorico doesn't have, because most of the things I miss are relatively trivial.
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I would be re-repeating myself if I went that route again, since I've been posting my complaints about Dorico/Steinberg's user interface shortcomings for almost a decade now – both here and in Steinbergs own forum.

If you want look at some of it and have some patience, here are some of my former repetitions:

Search results for query: dorico

vi-control.net vi-control.net
 
dcoscina said:
I’m only writing concert works as well and have moved to Dorico for anything that needs to be performed. Its part and performance cue features alone eclipse my experiences working with Sibelius. To each their own however. Just wanted to say Dorico doesn’t just appeal to film score people. :)
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Good points!

For finalizing scores, I'd definitely want some of Dorico's features. I live with Sibelius' quirkiness for better and worse...
 
syrinx said:
Good points!

For finalizing scores, I'd definitely want some of Dorico's features. I live with Sibelius' quirkiness for better and worse...
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Sibelius does some things much easier than Dorico for sure. but the things Dorico excels in are quite a bit better than Sibelius. I sometimes compose in MuseScore because I like the playback but gawd some of the stuff in that is just puzzling... like the way you have to get around trills for half and whole tones. Just stupid!!
 
Sears Poncho said:
Midi can be copy/pasted from Sibelius to PT and the opposite. I don't know if that works with other DAWS, I haven't had any luck.
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As I understand it, the new feature in Sibelius/Pro Tools is a standard MIDI clipboard, so it will work with any other app that supports MIDI on the clipboard.

I'd be very surprised if Dorico 6 doesn't have at least MIDI clipboard, if not some connection to Cubase.
 
benwiggy said:
As I understand it, the new feature in Sibelius/Pro Tools is a standard MIDI clipboard, so it will work with any other app that supports MIDI on the clipboard.

I'd be very surprised if Dorico 6 doesn't have at least MIDI clipboard, if not some connection to Cubase.
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This will be a nice feature--it is a little tedious importing MIDI to an existing flow, so Copy-Paste will be great.
 
benwiggy said:
As I understand it, the new feature in Sibelius/Pro Tools is a standard MIDI clipboard, so it will work with any other app that supports MIDI on the clipboard.

I'd be very surprised if Dorico 6 doesn't have at least MIDI clipboard, if not some connection to Cubase.
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Doesn’t Dorico have this already? At least I've been dragging midi from Cubase to Dorico.
 
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