Fred G. Unn wrote: ↑01 Nov 2019, 01:47
IMO, Dorico has done a poor job supporting that market so I'm not sure that's where they are going to make $. Most jazz musicians have never even heard of it and V1.0 couldn't even do a lead sheet.
...because it lacked support for chord symbols. But version 1.1, which was released in June 2017 as a free update, added chord symbols, so while it is accurate to say that Dorico 1.0 "couldn't even do a lead sheet", that was true only for a short period of time. If we had been able to add chord symbols, and dedicated drum kit notation, and slashes, and so on, all in the first release while still delivering everything else we delivered, we would have done so. Those who might like to imply that the reason Dorico 1.0 "couldn't even do a lead sheet" is because we in the Dorico team somehow don't value or prioritise the needs of musicians working in jazz and commercial music are completely off-base.
Like any creative endeavour, software development is hard work. It takes time, blood, sweat and tears to produce capable software to a high standard. Like any creative endeavour in which money is involved, there are deadlines, compromises, tough decisions at every turn.
Fred G. Unn wrote: ↑01 Nov 2019, 01:47
Current chord support is still a bit mediocre compared to Finale (I just posted a chord bug report on the Dorico forum a day ago that Daniel hasn't been able to figure out yet).
I don't think this is a reasonable assessment of the capabilities of the two programs when it comes to chord symbols. It is of course possible to produce chord symbols that look however you please in Finale, provided you're willing to edit the libraries to produce the appearance you want in every case, and Finale users of long standing have put those hours in many years ago. But there is no comparison between the semantic richness of Dorico's approach to chord symbols and that taken by Finale. Unless I am badly misinformed (which is of course possible), Finale doesn't provide native support for polychords, or automatically hide chord roots in order to show only changing bass notes, or have native support for jazz scale chord symbols.
You can also achieve chord symbols that look however you like in Dorico, to the point of editing the size and relative position of individual characters within the chord symbols, and save them for future use, rather like the library in FInale. We have taken an approach that attempts to provide sufficient flexibility that you can do this and still subsequently change your mind about which text font you would like to use, by implementing a system of stretchable attachments between different points on the glyphs in use. This is far more sophisticated than anything available in any other software, to my knowledge. There may be bugs, of course, but it's not as if Finale is 100% bug-free either, and what does the lead designer of Finale say when you ask him or her about a specific problem on their public forum...?
Perhaps you are no fan of the fact that chord symbols are system-attached in Dorico so that they are shared by all instruments and are automatically shown for rhythm section instruments and not for others. Certainly users expressed reservations about the difficulty in showing chord symbols only for solo passages (you would have to explicitly hide them elsewhere for that instrument), but the most recent Dorico 3.0 release provided two quick and easy solutions for this (an option to show chord symbols automatically in regions of slashes, or an explicit chord symbol region that can be quickly dragged out over a range of music to show chord symbols only in that region).
The remaining common issue that people ask about is how to show simplified or different chord symbols for different instruments in the ensemble, and that is still not practical in the current version, but we have been working on a simple solution since Dorico 3.0's release for this, and it will make its way into the software in the next (free) feature-focused update.
Fred G. Unn wrote: ↑01 Nov 2019, 01:47
There's not really any native support for a single staff piano for a sketch or lead sheet (although this is hackable)...
Yes, there is. You can either choose to hide one of the piano staves dynamically using the 'Allow single staves of multi-staff instruments to be hidden' option on the Vertical Spacing page of Layout Options, or you can manually hide and show staves using Edit > Staff > Remove Staff and Extra Staff Above/Below.
Fred G. Unn wrote: ↑01 Nov 2019, 01:47
... and there are lots of issues with percussion staves, to the point they are basically unusable for jazz or commercial music. I like the concept of their percussion staves, but a professional jazz drum part will often have fully notated music, slashes, and rhythm cues all in the same part. This is very difficult to achieve in Dorico, so I usually end up with two staves, one for notation and one for playback (if needed).
Here you are correct. In particular the fact that you cannot work with rests on percussion staves in the same way that you can on pitched notation staves is a serious impediment, and we do not yet have a solution ready for this specific problem. But we have demonstrated repeatedly over the past three years that we take these issues seriously.
Fred G. Unn wrote: ↑01 Nov 2019, 01:47
Dorico's spacing algorithms are great though, and its vertical and horizontal spacing is the primary reason I've mostly switched to it. They seem to be catering to the traditional publishing and choral markets though from my viewpoint, not jazz and commercial where many features seem to be less than fully developed.
Certainly we are trying to cater to the traditional publishing and choral markets, but we are also trying to cater to the jazz and commercial markets, and to film music, and early music, and learning/teaching, and, and, and... Professional music notation software cannot afford to target only one niche, no matter how much the people who work in each niche wish that it could, and decry any work on features that do not appeal to their specific set of use cases as evidence of the software not being "for them".
Fred, I'm glad you like Dorico and find it useful. I am also happy to hear constructive criticism of the things that need to be improved to make the software more useful for you. You are also of course welcome to your assessment that Dorico has done a poor job supporting the jazz and commercial music market. It may even be true (I disagree, and in general the feedback I receive concurs). But we do not lack commitment in trying to serve these markets, and we will continue to do so, just as we will the needs of contemporary art music composers, traditional publishers, musical theatre composers, teachers, students, choral arrangers, and so on, and so on, and so on.