Dorico () is a

scorewriter A scorewriter, or music notation program is software for creating, editing and printing sheet music. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they typically provide flexible editing and automatic layout, and pr ...

software; along with Finale and

Sibelius Jean Sibelius ( ; ; born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius; 8 December 186520 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often ...

, it is one of the three leading professional-level music notation programs. Dorico's development team consists of most of the former core developers of a rival software,

. After the developers of

were laid off in a 2012 restructuring by their corporate owner, Avid, most of the team were re-hired by a competing company,

Steinberg Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH (trading as Steinberg) is a German musical software and hardware company based in Hamburg. It develops music writing, recording, arranging, and editing software, most notably Cubase, Nuendo, and Dorico. It also ...

, to create a new software. They aimed to build a "next-generation" music notation program, and released Dorico four years later, in 2016.

History

The project was unveiled on 20 February 2013 by the Product Marketing Manager, Daniel Spreadbury, on the blog ''Making Notes'', and the software was first released on 19 October 2016. The program's title ''Dorico'' was revealed on the same blog on 17 May 2016. The name honours the 16th-century Italian music engraver

Valerio Dorico Valerio Dorico (Brescia, fifteenth century - Rome, late fifteenth century) was an Italian typographer. Over a period of sixteen years (1539–1555) he printed numerous editions, pioneering the use of a single impression printing process first deve ...

(1500 – c. 1565), who printed first editions of sacred music by

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina ( – 2 February 1594) was an Italian composer of late Renaissance music. The central representative of the Roman School, with Orlande de Lassus and Tomás Luis de Victoria, Palestrina is considered the leading ...

and

Giovanni Animuccia Giovanni Animuccia ( – March 1571)Lockwood and O’Regan, ''Animuccia, Giovanni,'' Grove Music Online. was an Italian composer of the Renaissance who was involved in the heart of Rome's liturgical musical life. He was one of Giovanni Pier ...

and pioneered the use of a single impression printing process first developed in England and France. The iPad version was released on 28 July 2021; it was the first major desktop scorewriter application to be made available on a mobile platform. It offers most of the functionality of the desktop app.

Features

Dorico is known for its stability and reliability in creating aesthetically pleasing scores and its intuitive interface. User feedback influences Dorico's feature design, and the development team actively use the forum and Facebook group.

Automation

Reviews have claimed that Dorico has become more efficient than other notation software. For example, a signature time-saving feature is its automatic creation of instrumental part layouts. Another signature feature is its automated condensing, where it combines multiple players' parts onto a single staff, such as for a conductor's score. Dorico condensing

Keyboard input

Dorico natively supports note input entirely from the computer keyboard without the need to use the mouse. It also supports MIDI input from a piano keyboard.

SMuFL music fonts

The Standard Music Font Layout (

SMuFL Standard Music Font Layout, or SMuFL, is an open standard for music font mapping. The standard was originally developed by Daniel Spreadbury of Steinberg for its scorewriter software Dorico, but is now developed and maintained by the W3C Music N ...

) standard was created by the Dorico development team at Steinberg. It provides a consistent standard way of mapping the thousands of musical symbols required by conventional music notation into a single font that can be used by a variety of software and font designers. It was first implemented in MuseScore, then in Dorico's first release and in Finale.

Version history

References

External links

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YouTube Channel
Scorewriters {{music-software-stub