The only aspect of Dorico that keeps me away are the slurs and ties, which retain the same ugliness inherent to Sibelius's slurs; I much prefer the results one can achieve with LilyPond or even Finale in that regard.

I recently got Dorico after having Sibelius 6 for so long, and am pleased with a few things:

1. How much easier it is to accomplish some tasks than Sibelius 6 despite being more familiar with the second program
2. How engaged the developers seemed to be with their user base on their own forum.
3. How much nicer the default font is than Sibelius' - only with a large amount of know-how and revision does Sibelius produce scores that I would feel comfortable selling. (Though I will probably upgrade Dorico's font to something else at some point)
4. How easily Dorico guides you to making high-level changes to the engraving instead of easily lost individual spacing edits.
5. How easy it is to produce multi-movement works and put them on a single page and in a single file. Gone are the days of Piece1a.sib, Piece1b.sib, collated onto a PDF only after the fact...
6. How I don't have to set a time signature before engraving, which is extremely useful for some chant adaptations and for some of my unmeasured music.

And there's more, but I've found it extremely easy to get used to. I'm sure the current versions of Sibelius and Finale are also just as good, but...I had to pick one, and decided to trust the vision of Daniel Spreadbury who as the original man behind Sibelius seems to be doing the right things.

Someday I would love to see a mode for 4-line chant - Spreadbury said they didn't have the time to make that now, but that it could be something for the future.

I might hit you up for advice now and then!

Final note: I do admit, Dorico is still not beautiful by any means. Some of the old scores (and new) manage to be, I wonder if there are any particular new fonts which can get closer to that for graphical-software newbies like me?

David Hughes is also enthusiastic about Dorico and used it during the Virtual Colloquium in June, in his talk about preparing your own scores of musical works when the commonly available ones are hard to read or are in an inconvenient key.

That week he released a new score of a Mass by Casciolini, which was sung at the annual CMAA Requiem Mass on Friday, June 25; and I assume he used Dorico for it.

I'm sure he did. I spoke to him about Dorico in Philly two years ago; he was about to make the switch back then. I believe he was waiting on figured bass at the time which came shortly thereafter.

There are quite a few parameters that you can adjust so you are by no means stuck with the default options. I counted no fewer than 64 current options and settings that can be manipulated in the engrave menu for slurs alone.

And none of them alter the basic shape, which is what I have an issue with and which looks nothing like fine hand-engraving.

Technical question: I believe there were big issues (at least at debut) with Dorico importing MusicXML and the like from existing files. A lot of us don't want to re-engrave the last ten years...

If that got fixed (it was claimed to be fixed at release, but wasn't), it'll be a great program.

There was only limited xml support earlier on. It is still somewhat limited but every program has its quirks. Increased support is promised and Daniel (done of the dev team) helped sus out the new xml spec, if I’m not mistaken. They add richer import and export support with every version; I’m very curious to see what d4 will bring in the relatively near future.

Fwiw, I’ve imported dozens of xml scores from places like cpdl and haven’t had any glaring issues, although I suppose it’s fair to say they were relatively straightforward scores.

Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico are all proprietary file formats. None of them can open the others’ files, nor should they. Further development of the universal xml spec is a good thing though.

Unless that was an open file format or they had a license agreement, that would have been illegal.

Some companies do license the ability to open their files elsewhere (you can open or save a Microsoft office .doc file in Apple pages, for instance) however this is the exception, not the rule. In the case of the three warring music notation clans, that won’t be happening, especially since there already exists a neutral interchange format (music xml).

They have significantly refined the xml import and export. To be clear, it’s never a perfect process, it many more aspects can be transferred now than 4 years ago.

I really do believe it’s the way of the future; I think there may be ways to batch convert files too. At least there was with Finale.

Yea I just don’t know… does anyone else have wisdom on this issue?

CGM, I'm very surprised to read this. I'm a regular on the forum and have never heard of this issue. I'll grant that some people have trouble installing the program since there are multiple steps, but a font issue preventing install is new to me. Did you report it or reach out to the devs?

Francis—to help me help you, can you be more specific about what you'd like to know or what your particular concerns are? I'm not quite sure how I can help, really.

All I can say is that I love working in Dorico and think it is excellent for church work, not least of all because it supports open meter in a way that is unparalleled by the competition (chant transcriptions are a breeze) and then the whole concept of "flows" is really useful for file management. This makes designing liturgies, or keeping multiple versions of things (think, hymn tunes with alternate text pairings, different arrangements of the same piece, etc.) really easy. There's a flexibility there that doesn't exist in other programs. Now there is also cutaway support, which makes things like choral responses really easy. Engraving quality is top notch, and the default output is head and shoulders above the competition, save Lilypond. Development is very active, and the dev team responds directly with the users. Multiple of my suggestions have made it in as features, so I know for a fact they pay attention to user feedback.

All of that said, no one can really decide for you if the transition is worth it. For what it's worth, Avid is downsizing, so that is rather scary. The senior product designer since 2021 was eliminated. https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/makemusic-avid-begin-2025-with-personnel-moves/ This calls future Sibelius development into question, and I rather expect it will flounder for a while. It really ground to a halt when Avid was bought out in 2023, and only recently started to rebound. Now, with Justin Tokke gone, it might very well slow down again. Make of that what you will. I would be nervous to have all my eggs in the Sibelius basket.

At a bare minimum, I'd start going through my .sib files and saving them as .xml to have a safety net.

Ultimately, you could always to the 60 day trial and see if you like how dorico operates, and whether or not you're reasonably satisfied with the results of xml imports. That might be the best way to inform your decision.

I really hate that the free version of Dorico does not install like most macOS apps, either by dragging to applications or with .pkg files with the little installation menu that is very simple and doesn’t require more than clicking and then letting the OS do its thing.

It is a total turn off for me if something doesn’t behave from the get-go like it should; making that a part of the reason to pay doesn’t work like that. Now, MS Studio misbehaves in a fundamental way once you open the app, as it treats each window as a separate process, so I can’t have tabs anymore, and therefore I can’t see what score is in what window, and the new Muse Sounds are external, so it’s constantly asking me for permission to access the thing outside the app (which would only happen once a day on opening MS Studio if the first problem were solved). But it’s somewhat less repulsive because it’s not my first experience with the app…

Thanks for your input, fellow composers. @Charles_Weaver... if the difference is switching to InDesign, how does Sibelius fit into that analogy?

The difference between word and indesign is light years. Are you saying Dorico is that much better?

I firmly believe that badly engraved music can waste a bunch of rehearsal time and can also lead to problems in performance.

It’s true. I think that I rightfully knock on Dorico’s flaw for the OS which I hope to never abandon (and I already have one thing with a huge, but very different, learning curve), all while freely accepting that MS Studio* does very, very stupid things that lead to mistakes that you don’t catch, which in turn lead to wasted time in practice, or which are regressions that they introduce (on top of their scammy, dark-advertising business model that is essentially set up to not pay corporate income taxes).

I also totally get that people made scores ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, but even for more popular pieces like the Palestrina Sicut Cervus, I’m a bit struck by the quality of available scores…

*though lately, due to collaboration requirements, I have forced myself to use Google Docs, and while Pages still wins because I can use the full OpenType features, almost everything goes right in Docs (the exception is placing a header without text and without body text after it; it does weird things to the page). Anyway, I think that it’s comparatively less of a step down from Pages than MS Studio is from better programs. :)

Hmmm… this is all very interesting information.