Upgrade Cubase to Dorico

Marc, with respect, this forum is the exact opposite of what you’re perceiving.

Though I don’t quite agree with Stephan that Cubase and Dorico have totally different aims, they do excel at different things. They have been developed by two teams in different countries, though there is obviously overlap between the two teams, and the two programs share playback components.

I can’t begin to imagine what goes on at either the Dorico or Cubase offices, but permit me to speculate: there’s all sorts of things that Dorico couldn’t do (polymeter?) if it were constrained by the existing architecture that Cubase has. Cubase has 30 years of history, and even if the code has been rewritten multiple times, there’s presumably still technical debt in terms of the way that long-standing users expect a particular feature to work. Dorico’s huge advantage over other notation software is that it has (almost) no technical debt whatsoever - the developers started from zero code and wrote it the way they thought best, albeit with over 100 years’ combined experience in notation software.

As to this forum and the many thousands of threads on it: the Finale forum has thousands of threads, and so does the Sibelius forum. You’ll frequently find users, on both, grumbling that their requests aren’t taken into consideration. Occasionally you’ll see replies from either customer service operatives or, more rarely, from the actual developers. You’ll find similar threads on this forum, but 99% of the time, here, the actual development team DO get involved (even on weekends and holidays), and if a request is reasonable then they’ll engage with it and perhaps implement it.

This forum doesn’t represent an unhappy user base, complaining about unintuitive software. It’s a thriving community, sometimes struggling to break old habits from other software, helping each other out.

I call sock puppet.

Cher Marc-Cubase,
As a fellow French user — I happen to have created the Dorico French users Facebook page as well as some documentation on Dorico for my french fellows — I can tell you there is a very straightforward way to use Dorico (Pro or Elements) as an addition to Cubase : export your files as xml, and you’ll be surprised by the output in Dorico, without doing anything. This is what surprised me most in the early days of Dorico. I could have spent hundreds of hours in S…, and a simple import into Dorico would make it look way better.
I do not say that the point you raise is wrong, but only that things take time, and this dev team surprise us with each update. Maybe it’s too soon for you to get onboard, maybe not. It’s up to you to decide, but whatever your decision, you’ll find some friendly ears here : we’re all dedicated to music.

And you can literally copy and paste MIDI data from Cubase straight into Dorico…

@ Daniel
Thanks for the time taken to answer my questions. Believe it or not, I favour a healthy discussion where critical remarks are not brushed away and we al l can learn in one way or the other.

@ dankreider
You seem to live in a world where only positive contributions are favoured. In my world both positive and negative but constructing views or comments go side by side. You don’t know me at all, so stop labeling and pretending to be mr. Know-it-all.

@ GTbannah,
No hard feelings

@VIPStefan
It is obvious that some form of integration is needed. The Cubase score-editor is outdated, but that is going to change sooner or later.
Someone suggested to integrate Dorico elements into Cubase which certainly would be a usefull leap. Filmscoring would benefit greatly with thus enhancement.

@ Marc Cubase
Thanks for your understanding. Somehow my so called “t…lling” stirred up a discussion somehow.

@ Rob Tuly,
Very funny, but can you contribute in a constructive way?

Well, I admit that I have no actual experience with Cubase and just assumed from what I’ve read. But it’s my perception that the focus of Dorico lies (or was originally intended to be) more in professional music engraving while Cubase’s focus lies in audio recording and production. And I speculate that this is also the reason why Steinberg created a new application in the first place; otherwise they could just have added the ex-Sibelius team to the Cubase team to work on improving its score editor.

And I agree with the age difference and the technical debt that Cubase likely has. It would be a huge impediment if Dorico was supposed to be fully backwards compatible to Cubase.

Not to mention forums by other software companies such as Adobe! :open_mouth:

I’ve been able to save quite a lot of time transferring xml files to Cubase users with instrument instructions for Halion. This has meant I could delay sending actual audio until the job was set in stone. Probably the first notation to DAW workflow improvement for a very long time. I know this kind of thing was possible with VSTs but it is painless enough Dorico to Cubase to make it worth the time.

Saying that cross compatibility is a simple thing between softwares that are as different as a DAW and an engraving soft is a daring assumption, to say the least!

There has been and there still is the tendancy that software is developped not from the users perspective but the software maker’s perspective.
At least that is my observation. When the software sells and is known, the software makers hardly listen to users. Now I’m not saying this is the case with Dorico, but the Steinberg Cubase history shows that at a certain point part of the team left Steinberg and created very user-friendly software called Studio One. It is good to monitor the needs of users through a forum or otherwise, but the decision making to implement a feature could be more open by letting users vote for which features they would like to see implemented first. Which features are needed the most. In this manner you let the users decide and not only the software development team, which prevents the possibility of making the wrong decisions. And if it sounds simplistic, it does because it is. Power to the users, because in the end they provide the financial means for the software and developpers to carry on.

Btw. English is not my native language.

Sorry, but I disagree with almost all of this. If you’d personally commissioned the software, you’d have a point, but you didn’t and so you don’t.

I don’t think users have any right whatsoever to decide how a business should be run. I also think opening up decisions to users is a recipe for disaster given that they will only have a fraction (at best) of the information and understanding that’s required to make those decisions. And none of the responsibility if it goes wrong.

The Dorico team have done a staggering amount of work in developing the program. Every release sees many, many things that users have asked for being delivered - all invariably to a higher standard than anyone anticipated. It’s clear that there’s a real sense of direction and ambition, and a plan in place for delivering their ideas. My best advice to you is to enjoy the ride. And who knows, one day you might get what you want . . . or maybe something even better that you hadn’t considered.

I don’t use pro software on the basis of the bread and butter stuff it does. I’m happy to do most things in almost any software package. I buy it because it either saves me time, or else it does niche things that I need, but that would probably never get voted up if it was a feature popularity contest.

What constructive answers!
I am very happy to see that Cubase and Dorico are living softwares and that my questions are shared by many others …
Concerning me, I will not fail to bring my stone when I downloaded the “beast”.
Thanks to Marc Larcher, I downloaded his “guide du débutant” which will help me for sure and I will try the method of which he speaks above in his comments.
Thank you very much.

This has been requested and firmly denied. Expression Maps - #197 by Rudie_Vissenberg - Dorico - Steinberg Forums

It seems that the language barrier takes its toll.
I am in favour of a system where users can vote for a specific feature. The pre-determined number of votes is the criterea for implementation. I don’t see why this would not work, because on the Studio One forum it does for quite some time now.
I did not say that users should decide how a company should be run, a silly remark btw.
However it has been proven that when a software company does not listen at all to their users, things may head a different direction.
Once more; this is luckily not the case with Dorico, but there is always room for improvement.

Right, that’s what has been proposed in the past: a user voting system for which features get development priority. At the link I posted, it was clearly declined.

So?? What’s your point?
Every time I read your posts in reaction to mine, I get the feeling you are trying to protect something as if it is a belief to you.
it’s just a piece of software, nothing more. I may even buy it some day. You may agree or not with my views, but at the end of the day, they are still mine.

I didn’t say it was a bad idea, or that I disagreed with it. In fact, I have also requested it myself in the past.

I was merely informing you that it has been requested before, and it has been turned down. Take that as you wish.

Should the ametuer audience tell the professional conductor how to play the score?

Maybe they should, just for the fun of it :smiley: