After the developers of Sibelius were laid off in a 2012 restructuring by their corporate owner, Avid, most of the team were re-hired by a competing company, Steinberg, to create a new scorewriter.[4][5][6][7][8]
The project was unveiled on 20 February 2013 by the Product Marketing Manager, Daniel Spreadbury, on the blog Making Notes,[9] and the software was first released on 19 October 2016.[10]
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 (1500 – c. 1565), who printed first editions of sacred music by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Giovanni Animuccia and pioneered the use of a single impression printing process first developed in England and France.[11][12]
The iPad version was released on 28 July 2021, offering most of the functionality of the desktop app.[13] It was the first major desktop scorewriter application to be made available on a mobile platform, however Sibelius also offers a mobile version.[14][15][16]
In August 2024, when the rival scoring software Finale was discontinued after 35 years, its company President Greg Dell’Era recommended switching to Dorico, calling it the “new future of the industry”. He said: “Many have competed with Finale over the past four decades… but when Dorico launched in 2016, it set a brand new bar for the industry".[17][18][19]
Features
Dorico supports complex musical notation, as seen here in the opening measures of Chopin's Ballade No. 4
Dorico is known for its stability and reliability in creating aesthetically pleasing scores[20] and its intuitive interface.[21] User feedback influences Dorico's feature design, and the development team actively use the forum and Facebook group.[22][23]
Automation
Reviews have claimed that Dorico has become more efficient than other notation software.[24][25] For example, a signature time-saving feature is its automatic creation of instrumental part layouts.[25] Another signature feature is its automated condensing, where it combines multiple players' parts onto a single staff, such as for a conductor's score.[26][27]
Dorico is known for its automatic condensing. In this conductor's score, Dorico has condensed instruments into one stave such as Oboes 1 and 2.
Keyboard input
Dorico natively supports note input entirely from the computer keyboard without the need to use the mouse.[28] It also supports MIDI input from a piano keyboard.
The Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) standard was created by the Dorico development team at Steinberg.[29] 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.[30][31] It was first implemented in MuseScore, then in Dorico's first release and in Finale.[32]
Bug fixes, new right-click menu for the status bar, support for custom "infix" characters for rehearsal marks, new option to consistently show bar rests in percussion kits if the bar contains only notes, ability to adjust lyrics vertically in Engrave mode in more circumstances than before.
Improvements across the whole application, particularly relating to human-sounding playback, note input, MusicXML support; more music fonts to choose from.
Note names shown in Key Editor, ability to specify transpositions for instruments in MIDI import, more support for customizing rehearsal mark formatting.
Automatic voicing in notation from chord symbols, DAW-like layout and capabilities in Key Editor mode including ability to show multiple instruments and/or multiple MIDI (CC, Velocity, etc.) views, split notes command, hide notehead engraving property, Play menu available in all modes (previously only Play mode), Keyboard view animated with playback.
Reintroduces Percussion editor with improvements to multiple instruments in a percussion kit, simplification of Linked Mode for Key Editor in Write mode, support for copy and paste of Expression and CC for MIDI channels.
Reintroduces dynamics editor to Key Editor and improvements to MIDI continuous controller editor; improvements to lyrics input, editing, and font handling; custom colors for layouts, voices, etc.; better support for printing flows.
Integrated Dorico’s DAW-like Key Editor feature into its Write Mode, fully reimplemented Play Mode (with some feature gaps compared to previous Play Mode), new scopes for Insert Mode, melodic and rhythmic transformations, improvements to transcriptions of MIDI import with workflows for DAW-based compositions, new Library Manager with ability to import and export settings between projects, new Jump Bar tool for accessing any command from a single entry point, adopting new Steinberg Licenser system, instrument filters in galley view, automatic instrument ordering per standard orders.
Improvements made to Play mode, Setup mode, bar numbers, chord diagrams, condensing, expression maps, figured bass, lines, markers, mixer, music symbols, ornaments, pitch before duration input, playback options, playback templates, playing techniques, rehearsal marks, staff labels, tablature, tempo, text, and user interface.
Pitch before duration in note input; enhanced expression maps; line style editors; figured bass support; condensing for divisi and section players; properties filter; manual staff visibility changes; clef and transposition overrides; use chord diagrams grid; graphic slices; making part-scores in Hollywood style; blank staves support, etc.
Features improved or added include MIDI recording, repeat markers, jazz articulations, tempo track import/export, flow headings, tacets, trills, staff brackets, and an editor for all music symbols.
Support for composing to video, a range of time signature styles, MIDI automation, divisi staves, ossias, additional staves for instruments, rhythmic slashes, bar repeats, playback techniques editor, the inclusion of Petaluma handwritten music font, and support for NotePerformer. Many productivity enhancements and minor additions were also added.
^Cap, Andrew Noah; Gibson, Douglas; Kretlow, Florian; Lapalme, Claude; Nicholson, Leo; Partridge, Ian; Rothman, Philip (5 September 2019). "Dorico 3 changes the score". Scoring Notes. Archived from the original on 5 January 2020. Retrieved 9 May 2021.
^Deller, Tony (7 February 2019). "What's the score?". Rhinegold. Archived from the original on 14 June 2021. Retrieved 14 June 2021.
^ abNowakowski, Mark (February 2020). "Steinberg Dorico 3". www.soundonsound.com. Archived from the original on 23 January 2020. Retrieved 14 June 2021.
^Kretlow, Florian; Lapalme, Claude; Nicholson, Leo; Partridge, Ian (5 September 2019). "Dorico 3 feature: Condensing". Scoring Notes. Retrieved 20 June 2021.
^Hess, George (1 November 2019). "Steinberg's Dorico 3". School Band And Orchestra Magazine. Archived from the original on 27 February 2021. Retrieved 20 June 2021.
