Dorico test-anyone tried? disappointed...

I use Cubase Artist 8.5. I read about Dorico but have not downloaded the trial version. Perhaps I will. Your comments re-affirm my believe that it is the inevitable goal of all high-profit software companies to release software that is barely 2/3 ready to go out the door. The world leader in that department is of course Microsoft.

Ironically, it's the third party guys who release software that fixes so many bugs in the Big Guys' crap software. These third party guys work for table scraps and donations. Meanwhile, Bill Gates earns (or shall I say is paid) about $15,000 per hour, and yet, he won't fix his crappy software (involved in the company or not!). But I digress...

I love Musescore because it does everything I need. Note entry takes time, but the developers have never claimed the program to be in the DAW category.

What was the question...:)...

I just tried it and it was a battle from the start.

for starters, the first thing you must do is register with their site to be sent a link to activate an account before they will send you a link to download their downloader. I was able to do this, but then when I tried to launch it, it wouldn't stay running (would just quit). I wondered if it didn't like our proxy so I set it to bypass and then it stayed open and gave me an option to start downloading.

that's when the fun began. The download is 9GB!!!!! FFS! 99% of this is a fairly crappy "orchestral" sound font, that doesn't sound (in the end) anywhere near as good as sonatina strings.

But wait, there's more. Once the download had finished 4hrs later (I'm on 100Mbps fibre here, but they obviously aren't geo-locating the download) then all you get is an "open" button which just opens explorer showing you a zip file. Great. they don't even bother with a self-extracting zip, or just a compressed properly built installer, you have to unzip (hope you have a free 9GB in your temp folder!). Then run the installer.

One of the first things it installs is a kernel driver. Since this is my software development machine I wasn't so keen on this, but they give you no idea what the driver is for. I poked around in device manager and it doesn't show up anywhere. I wondered if it was audio-related. I had a bit more poke around in c:\windows\inf, and checked the device install log. It's a USB driver used for software license verification.. Yet another FFS moment here. I think a few attitudes may need shifting over there.

Anyway, I finally got it running and opened a project I'd exported from MS in XML format. It loaded it up mostly fine.

The initial impression of the UI is that it's clean and nice looking. I did have some trouble with some basic functions though. I like the way it sees the word rit in temp marking and slows down. I'm not a fan of having to go to a different tab to play, but it looks like you can sort of play from other tabs as well.

Playback had a lot of trouble, lots of what sound like midi sync errors / bad samples, a lot of noise between notes, unwritten digital glissandi etc.

One of the biggest resources for MS is actually this support / Q/A site. I've picked up many many shortcuts and learned how to do a heap of things right here. That's the result of years of people asking and answering questions. I'm guessing Dorico will have to play catch-up with that. It's obviously an enormous endeavour to build a system like this, and first generation is simply just going to lag the mature product for a while. I'd be interested in how it looks in a couple of years.

Anyway for now I have to figure out how to uninstall it, including their dodgy kernel driver. Didn't they learn anything from the Sony rootkit DRM driver a few years back?

The reason I chose to have a look at it is because I've had battles getting nice layout and putting text into MS. You can't seem to drag text frames around, and they lose their location every time you open the project up again.