Dorico () is scoring software for

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Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

iPadOS iPadOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple for its iPad line of tablet computers. It was given a name distinct from iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhones to reflect the diverging features of the two product lines, suc ...

.Cliff, Tony. (1 December 2019)
Tech Reviews: Dorico Pro 3
''Music Teacher Magazine''. Archived 7 June 2021:

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. It is one of the three leading professional-level music notation programs alongside

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 ...

and the now discontinued

Finale Finale may refer to: Pieces of music * Finale (music), the last movement of a piece * ''Finale'' (Loggins and Messina album), 1977 * ''Finale'' (Pierrot album), 1999 * "Finale" (song), by Madeon * " Neo Universe/Finale", a single by L'Arc-en-C ...

. Dorico is developed by

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

, a subsidiary of

Yamaha Yamaha may refer to: People * Torakusu Yamaha, a Japanese businessman and founder of the Yamaha Corporation Companies * Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese musical instrument and audio equipment manufacturer ** Yamaha Music Foundation, an organi ...

, and its development team consists of most of the former core developers of Sibelius.

History

After the developers of Sibelius were

laid off A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff) for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing an organization ...

in a 2012

restructuring Restructuring or Reframing is the corporate management term for the act of reorganizing the legal, ownership, operational, or other structures of a company for the purpose of making it more profitable, or better organized for its present needs. ...

by their corporate owner, Avid, most of the team were re-hired by the competing company, Steinberg, to create a new scorewriter. 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, sixteenth century - Rome, late sixteenth 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 (between 3 February 1525 and 2 February 1526 – 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 V ...

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, offering most of the functionality of the desktop app. It was the first major desktop scorewriter application to be made available on a mobile platform, however Sibelius also offers a mobile version. In August 2024, when the rival scoring software

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".

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.

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 Unicode private use area music font mapping. The standard was originally developed by Daniel Spreadbury of Steinberg for its scorewriter software Dorico, but is now developed and main ...

) 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 MuseScore Studio (branded as MuseScore before 2024) is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source music notation program for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, and Linux under the Muse Group, which owns the associated online score-s ...

History

Features

Automation

Keyboard input

SMuFL music fonts

Version history

References

External links