david-p:
ShikiSuen:
… the biggest problem among Steinberg products are the overpursuit of product “completion”. Cubase is for MIDI arrangement, but it ships with too much non-important things, including its notation part which is pretty terrible to use. Dorico is the most comfortable music engraving software I am using, but your ambition regarding the completion of Dorico in pro-audio area is overflowing, pulling and tearing the balls of Dorico from running stable as a mere music typography software…
I have to agree with ShikiSuen on this point, which, in my opinion, was already a problem with Sibelius: both programs are designed to produce music notation on paper and also to synthesize the notation. Both these tasks are sufficiently Herculean and they are quite independent in their aims. Thus the concept of two separate programs, whereby the notation program could feed the synthesizer program, with those of us who know what our music sounds like being able to buy just the notation program, has a lot of merit to me. Thirty years ago I used an excellent CP/M program for text writing that, because of the lack of addressable RAM (64k max) was divided into three separate programs: Writer, Formatter and Printer. It worked very well – I wrote my 600-page PhD thesis with it and still use the Writer part, in the guise of Emacs, for extended writing projects. Dorico, by dividing Write, Format, Play & Print has a similar admirable structure. The problem is that the size of the Play part is enormous and does not of itself solve the problems of balancing different instruments.
Because of the portmanteau nature of Dorico, users are inevitably left clamouring for feature additions that take a long time to implement both in the notation and in the playback modes. Good examples of this are the playback of trills, grace notes and repeats, that from a purely notational point of view are quite unnecessary additions. I hope that the full development of Dorico will not take as long as that of Sibelius did. I consider it far more important to develop the notation side such that a single Dorico file can provide a score for the conductor’s screen and parts to the players’ screens that turn pages themselves, are easily editable on the spot, and show everyone where letter A is to make rehearsals more efficient. This is a far more exciting prospect than the ability to make fully nuanced mp3 files!
David
Thanks for taking my idea. Unfortunally Paul is not in a listening mood, according to his limited respond to my complaints in the past 12 months. For example: Even if Metal (incl. Metal 2) is good for 3d rendering acceleration, it surely benefits the UI responsiveness and fluency of some famous 2d-only apps (like Sketch and Logic Pro X ) on macOS (also the Windowserver of macOS High Sierra), and Paul ALWAYS refuse to admit that (but thinks that FPS is a game-only matter). Till now I didn’t see his idea gets changed.
PS.: Sketch is a famous app for 2d vector designs, and Logic Pro X has its own music engraving functionalities (not easy to use comparing to Dorico, but runs fluently).