A list of Advantages and Disadvantages to take into account when switching into Dorico
Thinking of switching into Dorico? A few months ago, our transcribers started to explore Dorico and integrate it as one of our day-to-day software programs.
At My Sheet Music Transcriptions, we always want to make our user’s life easier. So, here you have our first list of “Advantages and Disadvantages of Dorico”!
An Introduction to Dorico
Dorico is a scoring software developed by Steinberg since 2013, and first released on 19 October 2016. Dorico is known for its intuitive interface and reliability in creating aesthetic scores.
Dorico’s ability to generate high-quality instrumental part layouts automatically is one of its top-rated features. And vice versa, users often outstand Dorico’s autonomous capacity to condense multiple players’ parts onto a single staff, such as for a conductor’s score.
Key layout and engraving features
Regarding layout, Dorico stands out with its smart staff spacing. When using it, you’ll never have to worry about object collisions—quite a common issue, especially in complex scores! Additionally, based on the musical context, the software can also automatically adjust stem direction!
Thanks to the program’s layout advancements, in Dorico instrumental parts are beautifully auto-formatted, requiring little to no manual adjustments. This is a valuable time-saving feature for the engraving process, especially when working with full scores.
Super customizable program
Dorico users can customize the appearance of every item, instrument, and symbol in the score. When it comes to time signatures, Dorico offers impressive flexibility, allowing you to create compound times natively, and even use different time signatures across staves.
In addition, the swap feature lets you exchange music between staves and make adjustments effortless. In Dorico, Trills are more intuitive as well—you can display accidentals (♭ or ♯) automatically without manually adding them as text. Tuplets offer absolute flexibility—even crossing barlines.
A Couple of Disadvantages
In general lines, the learning curve is quite steep, as the software introduces many differences compared to other notation programs, and mastering all the new shortcuts takes time. Another challenge we have found when switching to Dorico is getting used to how notes extend across barlines with automatic ties.
Exported MusicXML files from Dorico may cause issues when importing them into other notation software, due to structural differences between the programs. Lastly, Dorico tends to take longer to start up compared to similar programs.
