Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH Blog Dorico 6 is now available: Perfect scores, faster

We're delighted to announce the immediate availability of Dorico 6, the brand new generation of our family of music notation and composition software for macOS, Windows, and iPadOS. This version is absolutely packed with new features, with a particular focus on engraving and workflow, though there are improvements throughout the application, and we hope that every Dorico user will find several things to be excited about.If you're an existing Dorico user, you can update or upgrade to Dorico 6 right now, or if you want to try before you buy, a completely free 60-day trial version is also available from today.Before we begin, check out the introductory video beautifully produced by my colleague Anthony, with music of his own composition, performed by cellist Cristina Munoz Caamano, who also appears in the video and on our web site. We hope it'll put you in the mood to find out more about what we've been working on, and why.https://youtu.be/i49-070BTNgHow it startedWe started working on Dorico 6 back in January of 2024, more or less immediately after the release of Dorico 5.1 in December 2023. We knew we had a challenging year ahead of us: we were deep into the ongoing project to bring a Dorico-powered score editor into Cubase (which of course arrived publicly in Cubase 14 in November 2024), we would need to continue to produce further maintenance updates for Dorico 5, and we wanted to tackle some substantial features for our next major version.Development for Dorico 5 had been primarily focused on playback features - starting with stage and space templates, pitch contour emphasis, polyphonic voice balancing, and so on, and culminating in the release of Iconica Sketch with Dorico 5.1 - so we wanted to make sure that our work on Dorico 6 was orientated more towards the core notation features of the application.We left that planning day with three main strands of work ready to start working on: cutaways, chord symbols, and proofreading. Half the team would begin work on those big features, and the remaining half would work on the Cubase Score Editor. We were off to the races!What we didn't know at the start of 2024 was that in the middle of our planned development cycle, we would have the opportunity to provide a future home for tens of thousands of Finale users, the partnership with MakeMusic that began in August 2024 not remotely on our radar as we began our planning. (Foreshadowing...)ProofreadingOne of our primary goals with Dorico is to make the whole process of producing performance materials as efficient as possible, at every stage. Dorico is full of automations to help ensure that your music is notated clearly and legibly, is balanced on the page, and has all the essential information required to communicate your intention to the performers. The new Proofreading panel in Write mode adds a whole new layer to this support structure, by flagging up possible issues in your scores and parts as you work.In other tools, you might choose to run a special plug-in to check for various errors or inconsistencies in the music, and those tools are always useful, but remembering to run those tools, and then to run them again after you make substantial revisions to the score, is another matter entirelyThe beauty of Dorico's Proofreading panel is that runs automatically in the background when you're not editing the music. You don't need to do anything, except glance from time to time at the badge on the icon for the Proofreading panel in the toolbox on the right-hand side of Write mode. Watch Anthony's introduction to Dorico's new proofreading features here:https://youtu.be/96yL2Hz3xh4It's important to stress that we don't view these features as a complete replacement for proofreading your music yourself. There's no substitute for printing out your music on paper and carefully looking at it, nor indeed for having a conversation with the people who will be performing the music to uncover any technical or presentational issues that need to be considered. You shouldn't think that if you dutifully work your way through the list of potential issues that Dorico provides, that you will definitely sail through your first rehearsal without a hitch. But unlike us fallible humans, who may forget to check the same thing consistently on every page, Dorico can provide a second pair of eyes that will always flag up issues when it sees them.We view the proofreading features in Dorico 6.0 as only the beginning, and we plan to add further kinds of proofreading in future versions. In this release, Dorico will warn you about issues with meter (bars too long, bars too short, suspicious pick-up bars, missing barlines, hidden time signatures, redundant time signatures, and so on), issues with missing or superfluous markings (two identical dynamics on the same instrument in quick succession, or a lack of a new dynamic on an entry after a new rest; redundant clefs, key signatures, time signatures, playing techniques, etc.), potential problems with instrument changes, and more besides.The Proofreading panel and its underlying architecture provides us with a scaffolding onto which we can continually build more of these kinds of checks, providing you feedback not only about the musical content of your score and technical issues of writing for particular instruments, but also presentational issues - for example, poor page turns, text cut off by frames or running over margins, missing page numbers, and so on. We have no shortage of ideas for further developments in this area of the software.Proofreading is available in every member of the Dorico product family, including the free Dorico SE and Dorico for iPad. We want to make sure this invaluable tool is available to every Dorico user in its current form. (Future additions to proofreading may be limited to specific members of the product family.)Cutaways and coordination linesCutaway scores are a kind of notation that was pioneered in the 1960s and into the 1970s by composers like Berio, Lutoslawski, and Stravinsky. In a cutaway score, when an instrument isn't playing, its staff disappears altogether.It's possible to produce cutaway scores in other notation software, but it's an incredibly laborious process: you have to create either a staff style change in Finale, or a staff type change in Sibelius, to prevent the staff from appearing. When the staff needs to reappear again, you have to manually do the reverse - and because you're doing all of this by hand, it's very easy to hide music that you didn't mean to hide. Furthermore, you need to do a lot of work to make sure that the staff labelling and bracketing is correct at the point at which each staff reappears.Not only that, but in other software, these changes will typically apply to the parts as well as the score - which is usually not what you want. Parts look the same as they normally would, with multi-bar rests instead of blank spaces. All in all, producing these kinds of materials in Sibelius and Finale takes an enormous amount of work, and you're also in for a similarly huge amount of work should you ever need to revise the performance materials.Dorico 6 changes all of that, because of its unique semantic approach to music representation, it can handle cutaways with literally a single click. Check out Anthony's video to see just how incredibly easy it is:https://youtu.be/jlX1JHygQbUCoordination lines are often - though not exclusively - used in cutaway scores. They join two staves, and are used to highlight particular entries or points of synchronisation. Particularly in cutaway orchestral scores, where entries can be vertically a significant distance apart, coordination lines help the conductor to coordinate the performance seamlessly. Again, creating coordination lines is simplicity itself, and can be done with a single click in Engrave mode.The amount of work that goes into making a feature as complex as cutaway scores as simple as a single checkbox that you can enable and disable is really astronomical. It touches pretty much every aspect of how music is displayed on the page, and intersects with many other features - for example, instrument changes for doubling players, and condensing. Behind this very simple checkbox in Layout Options is many months of toil and labour: we put the work in, so you don't have to.Cutaway scores and coordination lines are available only in Dorico Pro.Chord symbolsChord symbols are among the most deceptively complex areas of music notation. At first glance, they appear to be simplicity itself, but by now we have spent many years working on them. Dorico 6 provides perhaps the biggest improvements to chord symbols since their introduction back in Dorico 1.1 and their expansion with guitar chord diagrams in Dorico 2.Dorico covers all of the most-used conventions of chord symbols, provides dozens of options for customising chord symbols, and tools for editing default chord symbol appearances and individual chord symbols in Engrave mode. And despite this depth of customisation, there's still been significant demand for even more power - and Dorico 6 provides that in spades.First, you can now define your own custom chord symbols. Should there be a particular combination of intervals that Dorico doesn't describe in the way that you prefer, you can now create your own completely custom chord symbol. You can decide what it should be called, what you should type into the popover in order to produce it, and precisely how it should appear in the score.In addition to being able to create your own custom chord symbols, you can now adjust the appearance of any chord symbol - custom or otherwise - in such a way that the changes you make will apply not only to the current chord symbol, but to that type of chord symbol written on any root note. In previous versions of Dorico, edits to appearances would apply only to a single root - you would need to make the same edits one after the other, for each and every root to which you w