Upgrade Cubase to Dorico

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:

Another two cents…and this is coming from someone who wastes a fair amount of time seeing if I can force Dorcio to do things it’s not really designed to do yet.

The demands and needs of publishers of sheet music, anthologies, methods books, or scores is often quite different from the production of some sort of finished media for passive or interactive consumption.

The divide really is huge, so it makes sense to let a team focus on what publishers demand, while some other team focuses on what producers demand. Building bridges to make information more easily portable between the two worlds WILL come to us in time, but there are still plenty of standards to be set, tested, and locked in before anyone worries about the bridge. Furthermore, there is probably already plenty of cross platform theory going on in Dorico’s development that we users just don’t know about yet. They are quietly adding the code to the engine and testing it as we speak…and once it is READY, and USABLE, they’ll pop it into the UI for us.

Case in point…
I have many dozens of choices for software that can lock up with time code, sync with an unlimited number and type of instruments and processors located anywhere in the world, and produce a finished master recording for just about any multi-media project one can imagine. I only have about half a dozen truly useful apps for creating and engraving scores and parts. In the notation area, we still do not have tools that make it easy to do one click publications of things like SCORM learning modules for elearning environments (blackboard, moodle, course mill, etc.) or interactive app store like projects. We don’t have (quantitative and qualitative research) analysis software for musical compositions yet. We still struggle with the workflow of getting things on the page as we like, dealing with different paper or screen sizes and international standards. We still struggle with picking the best cross platform format for massive open archival or library projects, and the list goes on.

In short, commercial segments of music production are rather well serveed by existing software packages. In contrast, the academic aspects of musical software are still somewhat in the stone ages compared to pretty much every other industry or field of study. Pick a field of study other than music, and they already have dozens of apps that can deeply analyze, archive, and display all sorts of information that is equally, or even far more complex than musical theory. Hopefully Dorcio will lead the way in closing some of these gaps.

The latest DAWS are getting plenty of nice collaborative tools where producers can connect and work on projects from anywhere in the world, but those needs are quite different from the sorts of tools we need to collaborate on scores. Where producers want things like recording a live performer from 2 continents away, or being able to go in and tweak virtual instruments from afar…those working on a score would rather have simple clip and share tools, some sort of virutual conference room hosting tons of ‘research and academic focused tools’, a live copy of a score on the cloud where multiple composers can mark up versions and discuss things. The ability to lock sections of music where it can’t be changed, while leaving other sections open for tweaks, and the list goes on. It is a different set of ‘needs’…so the products do require some ‘independent’ evolution.

If Dorico developers spend all their time trying to force Dorico to fit Cubase like a glove, it will be that much longer until we get the kinds of tools that ‘publishers’ have been dreaming about for decades now. We want a lot of the same things DAW users are getting…but they need to be built differently, work differently, and serve different sets of needs.

As much as I love working in the DAW environment for all the post production bells and whistles, and the inspiring and ultra creative fine control over how things ‘sound’, I’d still much rather Dorico focus on bringing us ‘publishing tools’ for ‘publishing and more academic needs’. It’s still a young app, and at version 2, it’s already quite impressive.

I’m just one of many, so it’s just one opinion, but it seems to me like the Dorico Team has the right idea in terms of a long range vision. The needs of publishers are extensive, and different enough from the needs of producers to warrant a product that focuses on publishing needs FIRST and FOREMOST. Again, we’ve got all kinds of options for things in the producer software market, but the notation side of things is still but a baby in comparison. Let some team bring us into the 21st century for scoring and notation…the sooner the better.

To some degree I agree with your proposal, but I also see problems with it.

Case in point…I browse the Cubase forums regularly, and see far more feature requests to do things we’ve already been doing since 1992 on an Atari ST than I do for simple bug fixes and additions to the already great tools we already have. I see demands to add junk to the main DAW that we’ve already got 250 plugins for that do the job extremely well. I see demands for the sorts of features that just increase the base price of the software by forcing Stienberg to either buy patented technologies at installer levels and pack them in, or develop their own from scratch, and it’s often stuff that most users aren’t going to use. 30 new features targeted to EDM producers…because EDM is a bit of a trend that’s selling well in some parts of the world aren’t of much interest to someone that makes folk music in Nashville, so these apps start to lose their ‘universal’ plug in based appeal, and people keep having to buy more stuff they never wanted or asked for in hopes of getting the flexibility and power they thought they had already purchased…

So instead of getting a more robust XML import/export system, we got a ‘sampler track’. Well…I’d already been doing this sampler track thing quite well with Grove Agent and a MIDI track for over a decade…it required one extra step, but it was FAR MORE powerful and flexible…but that is what people ‘voted for’. So they say…

So…the result quite often is a basically just a new UI for a very old idea/code-base that we could already do in Cubase since many versions ago. It’s not really progress, but rather a shifting of the UI from a cognitive based user perspective where one reads a detailed manual of what all software can do, into a ‘constructivist’ frame of mind where one just clicks stuff at random and expects every tool to be hyperlinked with built in documentation or to be somewhat intuitive or self explanatory.

Meanwhile, we still can’t work with score events in batches through the project and midi logical editors. How hard it is to allow the logical editor to deal with one more field in the database and document it for the users? We can poke around in the installation enough to know that 98% is just a giant XML file…and that the ‘engine’ is already capable of sniffing out these fields and manipulating them in almost any way one can imagine…so why not give the user access? Nah…the voters just want a new skin that is LESS powerful, but supposedly ‘easier to use’?

We still cannot import an XML score and keep the terraced dynamics intact (one must delete the original ones, and replace them with special Cubase entries that are properly linked to the expression map system). How hard is it to parse the thing and automatically convert those into the events Cubase needs? Or again, make it so we could run it through the logic editor and convert them in a click if desired?

We still don’t get simple things like more track types for easier automation of the entire DAW (I cheat and do it through MIDI tracks, macros, Generic Remote Maps, and virtual ports, but just adding some new track types would save all this trouble). We still can’t automatically send a MIDI or VST event at the end of a slur mark, and the list goes on. Why? Because the people ‘voting’ for new features don’t really use the stuff all that often, and when they do, they haven’t bothered to read the manuals, and would rather blow another $25 on an update than take 5 minutes to read a section from a user manual and build a custom user macro.

So, those of us who actually use it every day say, “Hey, all we need is access to this field through your logic editor, or a hook to a scripting engine of some sort, and perhaps a new track type to make it bonehead easy to automate this.” Don’t want to code it? Just give us docs on the document format then, we can make our own programs in less than a day to batch edit this stuff! But we never get that simple ‘access’ or ‘information’…instead we get a shiny new skin for an old plugin under the hood that’s been forced to be the ‘new default’. They want us to ‘change our workflow’ and actually ‘give up’ our power user tools and abilities. After all, that’s what the ‘users’ who wouldn’t bother to build a macro if you paid them to do it ‘voted for’.

When it comes to ‘professional’ notation software, there truly are a ton of valid needs that the general user prone to hop on here and ‘vote’ is not going to know about, let alone care to use. Hard core academic needs for deep analysis, massive batch processing, peer review, and a wide assortment of target audiences and publishing formats. The general user isn’t going to give a darn if one can build up a SCORM learning module with 3 clicks in Dorico. They won’t care much if it can hook seamlessly into a university’s online music theory or form and analysis class. They wont care if it can find all the leading tones in a melody and circle it in red automatically, or analyze some parts and automatically generate a figured bass stave to go with it. They won’t care if it can manage the engraving portions of a 2000 page anthology on medieval motets, or handle the citation requirements of a doctoral thesis on some oddball Penderecki score. The result of a ‘populist driven’ development whiteboard would be kind of dismal for the bleeding edge academic who needs hard core research and publishing tools.

Perhaps it comes across as a bit snobish, but every other industry has a truly academic suite of software that is open enough to help individual users build and manage the bleeding edges of the industry, while also bulk processing the legacy norms and standards of all the ages. I do believe in free markets and the power that competition brings to innovation, but at the same time we have to take into account that even Hamiltonian Mechanics was considered pretty impractical (unmarketable) and useless for over a century, but now it is used in every hand held device we own millions of times per second. So…the needs of the ‘music snobs’ pushing for things that seem obscure and ‘unmarketable’ do have their place. I can tell the Dorico team cares about ‘markets’ and ‘general end users’, but it’s also nice to see that they listen to the bleeding edge voices of academics and publishers as well.

“There has been and there still is the tendency that software is developed not from the users perspective but the software maker’s perspective.”

Hello,
Sorry to add a question to this already heavily loaded chat… :wink:
I would like to know if I can download the Dorico elements version then the Dorico Pro version? The reason is, I would like to know if the Dorico elements version could be enough for my use. If it is the case and if I can use Dorico elements to write the theory parts then copy them into Cubase, this could be a cheaper solution than buying Dorico in its Pro version… If this try shows that the elements version do not the job, I’ll download the pro version.
Best regards.
Marc.

Yes, you can get 30-day trials of both versions: Try Dorico Now for 60 Days for Free | Steinberg

To set you straight: you don’t need to “download” both versions - you just need two trial licenses. There is only ONE Dorico application. The installers for both Elements and Pro are identical. The Dorico application runs either as Elements or as Pro, dependent on which licence is available to it.