And here we go! There's a bunch of videos on the Dorico YouTube channel already.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... Ghkst92MOs
Most visibly obvious are the changes to Piano Roll, MIDI editor, Mixer and Play mode; The new piano keyboard (or fretboard, or drum kit) makes note entry on a laptop very easy, without recourse to an actual MIDI instrument.
There’s some ‘smart’ MIDI import, both for files and for real-time recording, making polyphonic keyboard input a possibility. There are enhancements to how Insert mode works for Note Entry.
There are LOTS of productivity improvements: Instrument Filters (e.g. like Staff Sets in Finale), the ability to create and save project templates and ensemble groups. The Library Manager is also very useful for maintaining house styles across documents. Greater functionality for system breaks and locks. You can now Paste Articulations.
The Rhythmic and Melodic Transformations have been a long-standing request and seem pretty comprehensive. Dorico can now generate chord symbols from notation!
In terms of Notation (for this forum’s focus): Capos for fretted instruments, Numbered bar regions (e.g. counting over the top - previously only possible in slash notation, I think), improved control over enharmonic spellings, improvements to bar numbers, chord symbols, dynamic spacing, brackets for figured bass, more options for lyric hyphens (e.g. hyphen at the start of system or not), multi-bar rests.
Some goodies for John Ruggero - all types of centred beam are now possible; and there are properties for beam thickness and separation for individual beams. Other Property improvements include the ability to scale the size of accidentals. There are more engraving options for defining beam direction, spacing between notes and dots, accidentals and ledger lines, etc, etc.
There are vertical labels for groups of staves, e.g. “Choir 1”, which is a really nice feature.
Another thing I like is the new key commands for handling ‘voices’. Previously, when entering notes, you could create a new voice for note input with Shift V, and switch to a created voice with V. You can now do the same for selected notes! So pressing shift V will move the selection to a new voice, or pressing V will cycle the selection through the existing voices.
Something for font users and creators: any missing glyphs in the current music font will be 'filled in' by Bravura. (You can choose which font to fall back on.)
There are some 200 bug fixes. Another feature: when you already have a document open, you can choose whether subsequent documents will load playback samples, or not. This makes working between documents easy, as the samples don’t keep re-loading when you switch windows.
In short, almost every functional area has received some kind of improvement or enhancement. Lots of previous limitations to functionality have been removed or reduced. A great many things are fulfilment of explicit user requests.
All this, on top of a new licensing framework and native code for Apple’s M1 CPU.
This is what a ‘consolidation’ release looks like for Dorico. There may not be any new ‘killer’ features on the scale of Condensing, etc; though there’s something for everyone. Bear in mind that things like Flow Headings and Lines came in point updates to a major version, not the initial release, so who knows what we may see in the coming year.
Daniel has written two blog articles: one highlighting the new version:
https://blog.dorico.com/2022/01/dorico- ... -workflow/
and the other which describes 'the journey' since D3.5.
https://blog.dorico.com/2022/01/the-sto ... velopment/