Big Dorico news coming! Dorico Live Stream

[mducharme]

But I remain doubtful, as now for me, Dorico feels much slower, not only for notes inputting but for the responsiveness as a whole.

Make sure that you do not have any score layouts with condensing enabled in your project. Dorico becomes much slower with all edits as soon as any score layout has condensing turned on, even if you are not looking at that layout at the time. The reason is that it has to recalculate the condensed score with every edit. Only turn condensing on once you have finished your score edits.

Tantacrul in his Dorico critique video recommends having a score layout with condensing enabled but that is bad, and that is probably the reason he finds it slow.

 

[BlackDorito]

The PLAY part is the part that seems to be a advancing perhaps a bit slowly, not withstanding the immense potential.

There was a long thread about one year ago in the timeframe of Dorico 2 (I believe):

Exhausted with Finale -- is Dorico the answer?

What do you think? I usually am importing a midi or MusicXML file from Digital Performer as a starting point to orchestrate in Finale. I have been using Finale for over 20 years and its workflow remains frustratingly clumsy. If I'm importing a MusicXML file, how is Dorico as an orchestration...

vi-control.net

In that thread I was moaning about the half-baked playback capabilities as I migrated a sizable score from Sibelius to Dorico 2. I bought v2, but never could get v3 working (it no longer recognized Kontakt as a VST on my system), and now with v3.5 I would hope many issues are fixed - I know they are working hard. I'm not gonna pay $160 to upgrade to v3.5, but FWIW here are a few of the notes I made at the time, all related to v2 playback .. and perhaps fixed by now. For those thinking of taking the plunge, it might be worth researching some of these things. I continue to wish the Dorico team luck and I want to move off Sibelius some day.

• harp glissandi - easy to show in the score, but how do you specify the playback? [Sibelius has an awesome plug-in that allows you to specify the scale you will run up & down]
• Muting and Soloing - unclear how to mute/solo individual MIDI track sends to VSTi instruments. The documentation & videos seem to be related to earlier versions and don't work. Sibelius makes it fairly intuitive to audition just a few selected tracks/instruments from anywhere in the score.
• CC lane - make it horizontally resizable (as it is in Reaper, Cubase and other DAWs) so we can draw curves more accurately. [It's great that we can do this at all ... not easy in Sibelius] Also, since only one can be displayed, how do we remember which CC's are sending values on this track? Need to somehow show which CC's we've drawn curves on.
• Chase - haven't figured out how to specify that CC values and Techniques should be chased. Huge problem .. can't imagine that Dorico would not do this. Hoping it is my ignorance.
• Expression Maps - more simplistic than Cubase. This makes it easier to use ... and less useful. No way to specify that a 'dynamic' marking is implemented with a keyswitch - e.g. switching to 'sfz' for CSBrass - because 'sfz' is a dynamic, not a 'technique' in Dorico. Several other head-scratchers which I won't bore you with. Furthermore, no way to specify 'global' techniques - e.g. to create a track-initialize technique (set initial volume/pan/mod/expression/mics on a channel) - that could be used on every channel independent of instrument. This is simple to do in Sibelius using the Dictionary.
• Playback Options - velocity curves should be instrument-specific. If you have tuned the dynamics of multiple instruments over several hundred bars, and then add a new instrument that needs a unique vel-curve, you can't risk changing the global vel-curve.

I finally gave up and wrote this to the (very helpful) Support person:

John,

I'm giving up for the time being ... Dorico simply is not ready for prime time re. playback. I am wasting all sorts of time maneuvering around issues I don't have with Sibelius. Your Expression Map feature is just not working at the level of a professional tool at this point. It does not chase controllers/keyswitches correctly and I can see it in the MIDI stream. No matter what Playback techniques I define, it seems to think that it is always in Natural mode and doesn't bother to send the commands. Not chasing controllers correctly absolutely destroys my ability to tune/mix my piece and to create effective swells, crescendos, etc.

It's back to Sibelius for me. Please emphasize to your developers that effective playback is a key element of the attractiveness of Dorico and they should fix all playback bugs, improve the mixer and make the Expression Map feature more like Cubase for version 3.0.

Thx,

 

[BlackDorito]

If you are just programming some simple rules that is not AI, that is just programming. True AI is where you program the neural network infrastructure and then the rest of the time is spent teaching that AI by feeding it information.

30 years ago Stanford professors would be whacking you upside the head .. but now they would merely bow down.

 

[Bollen]

There was a long thread about one year ago in the timeframe of Dorico 2 (I believe):

Exhausted with Finale -- is Dorico the answer?

What do you think? I usually am importing a midi or MusicXML file from Digital Performer as a starting point to orchestrate in Finale. I have been using Finale for over 20 years and its workflow remains frustratingly clumsy. If I'm importing a MusicXML file, how is Dorico as an orchestration...

vi-control.net

In that thread I was moaning about the half-baked playback capabilities as I migrated a sizable score from Sibelius to Dorico 2. I bought v2, but never could get v3 working (it no longer recognized Kontakt as a VST on my system), and now with v3.5 I would hope many issues are fixed - I know they are working hard. I'm not gonna pay $160 to upgrade to v3.5, but FWIW here are a few of the notes I made at the time, all related to v2 playback .. and perhaps fixed by now. For those thinking of taking the plunge, it might be worth researching some of these things. I continue to wish the Dorico team luck and I want to move off Sibelius some day.

• harp glissandi - easy to show in the score, but how do you specify the playback? [Sibelius has an awesome plug-in that allows you to specify the scale you will run up & down]
• Muting and Soloing - unclear how to mute/solo individual MIDI track sends to VSTi instruments. The documentation & videos seem to be related to earlier versions and don't work. Sibelius makes it fairly intuitive to audition just a few selected tracks/instruments from anywhere in the score.
• CC lane - make it horizontally resizable (as it is in Reaper, Cubase and other DAWs) so we can draw curves more accurately. [It's great that we can do this at all ... not easy in Sibelius] Also, since only one can be displayed, how do we remember which CC's are sending values on this track? Need to somehow show which CC's we've drawn curves on.
• Chase - haven't figured out how to specify that CC values and Techniques should be chased. Huge problem .. can't imagine that Dorico would not do this. Hoping it is my ignorance.
• Expression Maps - more simplistic than Cubase. This makes it easier to use ... and less useful. No way to specify that a 'dynamic' marking is implemented with a keyswitch - e.g. switching to 'sfz' for CSBrass - because 'sfz' is a dynamic, not a 'technique' in Dorico. Several other head-scratchers which I won't bore you with. Furthermore, no way to specify 'global' techniques - e.g. to create a track-initialize technique (set initial volume/pan/mod/expression/mics on a channel) - that could be used on every channel independent of instrument. This is simple to do in Sibelius using the Dictionary.
• Playback Options - velocity curves should be instrument-specific. If you have tuned the dynamics of multiple instruments over several hundred bars, and then add a new instrument that needs a unique vel-curve, you can't risk changing the global vel-curve.

I finally gave up and wrote this to the (very helpful) Support person:

John,

I'm giving up for the time being ... Dorico simply is not ready for prime time re. playback. I am wasting all sorts of time maneuvering around issues I don't have with Sibelius. Your Expression Map feature is just not working at the level of a professional tool at this point. It does not chase controllers/keyswitches correctly and I can see it in the MIDI stream. No matter what Playback techniques I define, it seems to think that it is always in Natural mode and doesn't bother to send the commands. Not chasing controllers correctly absolutely destroys my ability to tune/mix my piece and to create effective swells, crescendos, etc.

It's back to Sibelius for me. Please emphasize to your developers that effective playback is a key element of the attractiveness of Dorico and they should fix all playback bugs, improve the mixer and make the Expression Map feature more like Cubase for version 3.0.

Thx,

As far as I know half of these have worked since version 2. Harp glissandi is configured in the properties panel, or you can just program your own in a hidden staff below (I have a harp vst that it has its own configurable gliss). I can't remember when they added the solo, but now if you select a track and press play it will only play that one. You've always been able to zoom the cc lane, you just have to use stupid key (Z & Y) instead of the universal mouse wheel ! Expression Maps have seen improvements, but not the ones you mention and much less independent velocity curves....

 

[Robin]

harp glissandi - easy to show in the score, but how do you specify the playback? [Sibelius has an awesome plug-in that allows you to specify the scale you will run up & down]

In fact you can set the harp pedalling and the glissando you write will play back according to it

 

[mducharme]

Expression maps does now have an init technique but it is different for each instrument. It just sets the default settings when it loads (ex. default keyswitch).

 

[Daryl]

I'm downloading it right now, and have a score to type later today. Will report back.

 

[DavidRubenstein]

If you are just programming some simple rules that is not AI, that is just programming. True AI is where you program the neural network infrastructure and then the rest of the time is spent teaching that AI by feeding it information. The AI neural network then gets bigger and bigger and more complicated through experience, not through programming it. In this way incredibly complex decision trees can be built up by the computer itself without much or any planning by developers.

Sorry for the late response ...

Actually, what you are describing is called Machine Learning (using a neural network), which is a subset of AI. AI also includes a tree of rules that were programmed with the help of experts.