What's wrong in the world of notation softwares?

An excellent question with a not so obvious answer. I’ll try the short version. Cubase’s score module primarily exists to handle editing a single line of a midi performance and it has been well developed over many years. It does a good job at a single line or a grand staff. Cubase is a full DAW built around creating and editing a finished audio product to which the score edit is a component.

Dorico (and the other “engraving” programs) are built around the needs of producing a visually excellent engraved score for performing musicians who are handling lots of different instruments. To that end, there are a lot more rules that must be obeyed to help performers sight-read a piece as they are playing. These programs also excel at handling transposing instruments in an orchestral arrangement, making it easier for the composer to generate “parts” for the different instruments from the conductor’s score. The musical generation capability in these engraving programs, for the most part, are to generate acceptable renditions of the written score for the purposes of “proof listening” to the piece for musical errors. They are (although Dorico is pushing beyond this paradigm) poorly suited to preparing a full orchestral mockup due to their limitations in midi editing, managing complex (multi-articulated) virtual instruments, incorporating recorded audio, etc.

Again, Dorico is (in some future state) challenging the paradigm that engraving programs have weak audio support, but I would be skeptical, given the range of differences between VI’s and the amount of control editing needed for a grand mockup (or even a finished audio master) of an orchestral piece.

For may working composers, the workflow is Score Editor to orchestra, or Score Editor to DAW (Dorico to Cubase). I do know some guys who work DAW → Score Editor → DAW (or orchestra) but these are ones that are often capturing their own performance as an initial step (historically, engraving programs are notoriously weak at capturing live performances.) There is a very hot debate among composers between those who go from Score to DAW (without using much in the way of live musicians) and those who go from score to orchestra or live performance. Dorico is trying to serve both communities as I understand their pitch (a roadmap of feature releases would be real useful here.)

Because of the level of complexity of a full engraving program and full DAW, these components are likely to remain separate for some time to come, but Steinberg (and others) are working on improving workflows from Score Editing (engraving) to DAWs as we speak.

Wouldn’t you mean polytonal music ?

No, polytonal music uses several different keys at the same time.

An example of polymodality is near the end of the first movement of Beethoven Op 81a (“Les Adieux” sonata) where one hand has a dominant chord and the other a tonic chord, simultaneously, and the V and I chords alternate between the hands for a few bars.

Where are the +1 and Thumbs up symbols when you need them - for all the ‘aye’-sayers and rebuttals of negativity.

Dorico is still developing - yet it is so clearly going in the right direction, has excellent support, and can do an amazing number of things - and do them very well.

I don’t think he was saying the music was polyvalent.

In French (and maybe other languages) It’s a fairly commonly used adjective describing a person basically being multi-talented. Valent meaning value, poly meaning many.

It could also mean he writes a lot of different types of music.

I’m ok with this. I’d personally be happy with the ability to prep and export a Dorico ready file from Cubase and vice verse. Since the DAW engine is the same, I don’t really see any need to run CuBase and Dorico at the same time and ReWire them or anything. Just make it so a near ‘one to one document exchange’ (on the notation, text, and articulations, obviously some of the fine details of formatting, engraving, and page layout could get lost in transition). Since the audio engine is much the same, such a document exchange should be able to also set up all the same VST/VSTi plugins all ready to go.

Really, when it comes to bringing something from Dorico into a DAW like CuBase, I’m personally OK with a good MIDI translation (once it’s parsed through the expression maps and all), but it would be nice if we could just load up a Dorico file into CuBase…and end up with something as close as possible to what we had over in Dorico, with instruments all loaded exactly as they were in the Dorico session and ready to start work.

In the short term XML export/import is a good start…
I haven’t really had much time to try exporting XML from CuBase and importing it into Dorico to see how well it takes and vice verse. It’s been pretty hit and miss for me when importing CuBase XML into Sibelius or Finale. The biggest frustration being percussion staves (I can’t seem to find the one to one percussion stave mapping that’ll import into the Score package without me having to totally rework percussion stuff). So far I have the best luck just exporting the percussion stuff on a piano grand stave…then sorting it all out on a fresh Percussion stave in Sibelius/Finale once I import it.

If anyone knows of a process, mapping, whatever, that can quickly and easily get a 1 to 1 percussion stave ported I’d love to learn about it. I tried to start a thread on this over in the CuBase forum and didn’t get a single reply.

Hair pins and lines are the next problem area for me so far. While they usually do port over from CuBase into Sibelius and Finale…it’s often a big fat mess that I have to rework. For some things Finale imports it better, and for others Sibelius does better. Don’t have much experience yet trying it with Dorico.

When coming the other direction…from XML into CuBase…I’m surprised at how well most of it imports. The part that annoys me to no end is why it will not change the terraced dynamic markings into the proper “Score” events (the kind that show up in the Key Editor as a lane). One either has to manually replace them one by one in the Score Editor, or cheat a bit by building expression map entries that scan for things like p, mp, mf, etc. and scale things using Volume (CC7), while leaving expression data on CC1 or 11. I also wish the Logic Editors could manipulate these special ‘score events’ like we can MIDI events.

I LOVE this functionality! And I DO NOT WANT THIS TO CHANGE! I cannot tell you the number of times in Sibelius that I accidentally clicked on a note head, while I was trying to drag through the score, only to move the note to some wrong position on the staff. Depending on how late it was (me being tired), or how rushed I was, I didn’t catch the error till playback. Then I had to hunt down the issue. The fact that you cannot simply drag a note by accident is HUGE for me.

Maybe a thought would be to enable a way to turn this function off, but I rather like it and the thought that went in to it. If I need to make a change, I have to want to make the change. There is no way I accidentally was holding down ALT to scroll through the score.

Just my 2 cents…

Robby

what would you suggest for octave up and down? There needs to be a hot key for this.

The most common use for moving notes up and down is when you’re making an accidental (since otherwise the note you typed in was already correct). For this you need the shift modifier as well, so there are not really any left to allow for octave up and down.

It’s really common for say the violas to be playing the same thing an octave down, so you copy the violin part over and select it and ctrl-down arrow solves that in Sibelius and MuseScore. In Dorico I couldn’t find any other way than hitting down 8 times, and each time it took about 3 seconds to complete, so very tedious.

There will need to be something done to speed up application of changes in the end, this is a problem also in MuseScore. Larger scores become unworkable to edit as each change takes about 3 - 5 seconds to happen (including dragging an annotation).

May need to pre-filter rules based on the type of action to reduce the rule <-> object interaction operations required after a change. I haven’t tried, maybe it’s a lot quicker in galley view.

Shifting by octave in Dorico is Ctrl+Alt+up/down arrow. Alt+up/down arrow moves by a large step (e.g. by what you might think of as a diatonic step in 12-EDO), and Shift+Alt+up/down arrow moves by a smaller step (e.g. by half-step in 12-EDO or by a quarter-step in 24-EDO, etc.).

There already is: Control-Alt-Up/down by default.

There are also key commands to add accidentals, as well as to move the pitch of a note by a semitone.

If you want to make the key commands match a different app, you can edit them.

Note, the key commands are sensitive to what “mode” Dorico is in, which delays the time when you run out of shortcuts. For example you can make A-G have a different shortcut function when you are not in note entry mode.

Personally I mostly use a desktop keyboard with a numeric pad, and I’ve remapped the note entry key commands that I use most often so that I can keep my left hand on the left end of the main keyboard (for A-G and several other shortcuts) and my right hand on the keypad. Not quote conventional “touch typing”, but it works for me! ( I also turned off the Z and X shortcuts for zoom in/out, because I kept hitting those keys by accident - and my brain is already programmed to use Ctrl-plus and Ctrl-minus for zooming)

ok thanks for that!

"So, this is my tought on the notation software market, and sadly I can only conclude that there will probably never be a real decent software for those who don’t limit themselves to orchestral music. "
DT-Sodium, I read your post - and I think the reason why Dorico still is missing several things some of us had hoped to see in the initial version is that they’re beginning a new project and want to start each of the various functions that need to be in there the right way. So things take time. Also, it’s so far mainly aimed at engravers, it seems - not composing, or making educational material, or making mockups which require a good workflow for CC automation, and not for making piano music… and so on. But I thing that the UI in many ways is good. In other ways it’s very… old fashioned; simple things need a lot of steps to execute, one need to memorise many key commands (and they are cumbersome to reassign) - and so on.

I disagree that if someone suggest that program XYX in many ways is better, just use that instead - because the reason some of us has started to use Dorico is that we want something which has the goodies the competition has: only with a better UI and with the extra functionality that never was implemented in program XYZ. And IMHO, "it’s not a DAW’ isn’t a valid argument either: I guess we all would prefer a DAW with a 100% pro score editor (or a pro score editor with the stuff we have used DAW for in the past, as part of that score editor).

One day some company (all relevant companies) will make a DAW/Score editor combo with a transparent UI and a minimal need to search up how things should be done, because it already is implemented in the easiest possible way (and in ways people expect things to be implemented). Will Steinberg be the first company to release such a product? I have no idea. But with Dorico’s good fundament (I say this even if feel that there are areas in the UI which are counter-intuitive), Dorico could develop into a brilliant all-in-one solution.

“So Dorico is made to write classical music only ?” If it helps, there are certainly shortcomings for work with classical music as well. I expect it to take maybe another year (or two) before Dorico has real time MIDI recording, or commands needed for composing/editing piano music, at least on the level Sibelius had. But when I bought Dorico, I was prepared for that.

If you generally think that there’s something wrong with “the world of notation software”, I wouldn’t have stated it that way. But there are really many things that could have been implemented in a much easier way. (And also a number of users who don’t expect new and innovative solutions - or a workflow which requires a lot less clicking, manual reading and so on. Nevertheless, they key is IMO - patience.

Ctrl-Alt-down (or Cmd-Alt-down on Mac) moves the selected notes one octave down. No need for 8 keystrokes.

Oops - already answered. Sorry.

You guess wrong. I have hardly any use for a pro score editor bundled with a DAW. Unless the DAW was genuinely “free” (i.e. not just a bump to the package price) and totally transparent (in the sense that I could get playback for audio proof reading by doing literally NOTHING) it would usually just be an added expense and a time-waster.

And a DAW which comes with a “free” (in marketing-speak!) lightweight sound library that has standard orchestral instruments missing means spending yet more money on a different library, of course…

So far as I’m concerned, Dorico says “Notation program” on the box, and the only thing I want is that it does what it says on the box - so long as it does it very very well, of course!

Copy the part over as you’ve been doing and then use ctrl-alt-down arrow to move the copied part down an octave.

Stew

Option-command arrow moves notes up or down an octave. (Mac–I assume there’s a Windows spelling of this).

Yeah sorry, in French “polyvalent” means doing many different things. It doesn’t even mean being good at it actually.

As a developer myself, i perfectly understand that creating the perfect program takes time. Still, i have some problems with the way today’s programs work :

  • Dorico costs close to 600€ (about 300 for a crossgrade, limited time offer). That’s a huge amount of money for a software that may or may not fill my need in an uncertain amount of years (and from what I see it might still need about 3-5 years to even come close to what Sibelius or Finale offer). When I bought Notion, it costed about 80 bucks, that was an okay price to bet on a newcomer and even then, it’s been about 5 years and the soft still can’t handle drums. I get that the Dorico is still a work in progress. Well, can I use it now and pay when it is ready? This looks more like an overpriced beta.
  • From what I see, Dorico still has a huge way to go to ever come close to it’s rivals. I discovered yesterday that it doesn’t even have rudimentary support for tablatures and guitar articulations. Why would I pay at least 300€ for a software that is years behind it’s opponents in terms of functionalities ?
  • A software can’t live without a community, for feedback as well as to get some money to justify paying a team to work on it. Most user, after trying a software that doesn’t meet their needs simply uninstall it and never come back. How do you expect Dorico to live on ? On the forums I usually use, there is no single topics about Dorico, it’s like it doesn’t even exist.

Finally, my comment was not as much about Dorico itself but more about how the market fails to offer a tool adapted to most musicians : electro writer are expected to work with a piano roll in a Daw, pop and rock writers use guitar pro, jazz musicians probably use some chords diagrams taped on some wall and orchestral music writers use Sibelius or Finale. While all notations software have their pros and cons (which is normal), they also have their very own huge flaws that make it unusable once you want to mix heavy metal with symphonic instruments for example.

You have to put the cost into perspective. If your work is worth 20€ an hour, then 600€ (ignoring the cross grade offer) is worth 30 hours. If Dorico speeds up your work by only 2%, that will pay back the 30 hours in a year and Dorico was effectively free. (And from my experience, you save a lot more time than 2%).

Of course if you don’t make any money from what you do (or from anywhere else if you are student etc) that logic might not apply to you!

I wonder if anybody makes money from the notation options in Notion - they used to be pretty primitive, and last time I looked (not recently) Notion didn’t even have a demo version, you just had to believe how wonderful it all was from their website. Paying 80€ with that little information really is taking a shot in the dark IMO!

:unamused: :wink:

I was genuinely worried that I would sound snobby if I questioned whether anyone used GuitarPro in a professional context, but then DT said that “jazz musicians probably use some chords diagrams taped on some wall”. Now I’m much more at ease, really.

I would say that you’re complaining that a certain tool, which you admittedly cannot manipulate to its full extent and potential, cannot fully concentrate the whole of your workflow, which is frankly an unreasonable demand either way. Some people sound like they’ve been forced at gunpoint to buy the software. Jeez!