Dorico 4 is here to supercharge your workflow

We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of Dorico 4, the major new version of our music notation and composition software for macOS and Windows. Some eighteen months in the making, it is our largest ever single release, and is packed with useful new features and improvements throughout the application.

To give you a sense of some of the top features in this new release, check out this short teaser video that highlights just a few of them, and then let’s dive in.

Watch the live streams

If you are reading this on Dorico 4’s launch day, Wednesday 12 January 2022, then you can tune in live on YouTube at 2pm UTC to see our product specialist John Barron demonstrate some of the new features. I and other team members will be on hand to answer questions in the chat.

If you would prefer a German-language demo, join business development manager Markus Hartmann for his presentation at 4pm UTC (5pm CET), also on YouTube. Again, team members will be on hand to answer questions in the chat.

It’s all about workflow

If there is a theme that links the new features in Dorico 4, it’s the desire to improve workflow. Many of the improvements, both large and small, in the update are designed to make tasks that were already possible in one way or another easier and faster to accomplish. I‘ll write about several of them below: bringing the Key Editor into Write mode so that adjusting the audio performance of your music is much more integrated, removing the need to continually re-find your place as you work; transforming the process of bringing MIDI data into your project as the start of an orchestration or arranging job; radically extending Insert mode so that it becomes an even more essential part of the note input and editing toolbox; making it easy to move notes between voices and to convert to and from grace notes so that you have to re-enter things less often; providing quick new tools for casting off in Engrave mode; bringing every command in the application right to your fingertips with the new jump bar; and so on.

All of these improvements come from the same impulse: to provide you with tools to get from your original idea to your finished score more quickly and more easily than ever. As Dorico has grown and matured over the past five years, it has grown in power and capability at an exponential rate. Dorico 4 represents a kind of consolidation of that explosive growth in power, and provides us with an evolved framework for how the application can continue to grow and develop in the second half of its first decade.

Key Editor in Write mode

You will already have seen that Dorico’s signature and much-imitated look and feel has been further refined in version 4: colours are deeper and more vibrant; there are fewer outlines and borders; the iconography has been revised throughout. But perhaps the most obvious change is the greatly expanded role of the lower panel – now rechristened the lower zone, for consistency with Cubase. First introduced in Dorico for iPad, the lower zone, formerly the home of only the Properties panel in Write and Engrave modes, now houses six different panels in Write mode. We’ll mention some of the others later on, but the one that perhaps promises to transform your workflow the most is the inclusion of the Key Editor.

Right from its very first version, Dorico has included sequencer-style editing tools in Play mode, but with the benefit of hindsight and a good deal of user feedback over the past few years, it’s evident that our decision to keep the MIDI editing tools confined to Play mode was, ultimately, incorrect. In particular, the need to continually reorientate yourself when switching between Write and Play mode made it hard to make the context switch between editing the printed notation and adjusting the performance. And even though it was possible to input music using the piano roll editor, this was rarely practical because of the disconnect between the piano roll display and the resulting notation shown in Write mode.

More directly integrating the MIDI editing tools into Write mode makes a huge difference. As you change the selection in the staff notation, the Key Editor automatically updates the music that it shows, bringing the music from the current system in the selected instrument into view. The Key Editor also provides a more mouse-centric way to edit notes, allowing you to repitch, change duration, and move notes easily. (We do plan to add similar features for manipulating the notes in their notated representation in Write mode in future.)

Because the Key Editor has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, at the time of Dorico 4.0’s initial release, a few capabilities that were included in Dorico 3.5 have not yet been reimplemented in the new framework: notably, you cannot edit the tempo profile (though of course you can add and edit tempo marks in Write mode as always); the dynamics editor is not yet included (though you can edit MIDI continuous controllers directly); and the drum editor is not yet included (so percussion tracks will appear using the standard piano roll editor). We’re sorry that some of these capabilities are not included in this initial release, but we will bring them to Dorico 4 in one or more free updates as soon as we can.

Revamped Mixer and Play mode

Again expanding upon the work that went into Dorico for iPad, Play mode itself has been completely rebuilt, and so has the Mixer.

The Mixer is now available both in the lower zone and, as before, as a separate window. The lower zone Mixer includes the basic controls for balancing your music – volume and pan faders, and the ability to mute or solo each output – and is always at your fingertips in Write mode or Play mode. The separate Mixer window includes an additional section in which you can display Insert effects, the channel EQ settings, and control the amount of signal sent to the FX channel (where the REVerence convolution reverb is inserted by default). The Mixer as a whole is now more beautiful and more performant, and provides a solid foundation for us to build additional functionality in future.

A basic form of the Mixer’s channel strip can now also be found in the new track inspector on the left-hand side in Play mode. The controls for specifying how the selected track should be routed to a specific output on a VST plug-in are now presented in a way that will be familiar to anybody who has used any modern digital audio workstation. You can also see the insert effects for that output at a glance, as well as adjust volume and pan from the individual fader shown there.

The VST Instruments panel that used to be on the right-hand side in Play mode is now tucked away behind the track inspector on the left, allowing more room for the track overview.

As with the Key Editor, a few features that were included in Play mode in Dorico 3.5 have not yet been reimplemented in the new Play mode, including the ability to drag and drop MIDI clips from Cubase, but these features will return soon in one or more free maintenance updates.

Insert mode

Each major version of Dorico brings us a little closer to the original vision we had for the software that we expressed when we were sitting around empty tables with notebooks in the first few weeks of our time at Steinberg, before we even had computers to write the application with. In Dorico 4, there are three such features that represent another step towards that original vision, and the first of them is the huge changes we have brought to Insert mode.

When we first conceived Insert mode, we imagined that it would be possible to specify the scope of the Insert operation: should it affect only the current voice, or all voices in the current player, or the entire ensemble? It has taken a while, but we are pleased to say that the tools we originally imagined are now here in Dorico 4.

When you choose to insert music for the whole ensemble, you can choose whether to push all of the existing music along, crossing the existing barlines and creating new bars at the end of the flow if necessary to accommodate it, or whether you would rather grow or shrink the current bar only, enlarging it dynamically to whatever length you would like it to have. You can further choose whether or not that bar should show an appropriate time signature, or whether the time signature should be hidden automatically: the latter option is especially useful for things like cadenza passages, or unmeasured chant or similar liturgical music. Switching between the four different Insert mode scopes is as simple as typing Alt+I repeatedly.

The other big change for Insert mode is the introduction of a stop position: this addresses one of the limitations of using Insert mode in previous versions of Dorico, namely that you could not control the point at which it should stop shuffling the music to the right of the edited position along. For example, you might have a passage of music followed by a large number of empty bars, and you would be happy for edits you make in that passage to consume some of the following empty bars, but you don’t want it to also push the music after those empty bars along – and until now there has been no way to do it, but that’s exactly what the new stop position provides.

Simply select the point at which you want Insert mode edits to have no effect, and either click the little “no entry” icon that appears above the system track, or type Shift+Alt+I to set the stop position at the start of the current selection. You can move the stop position simply by dragging it (and drag it off the score to remove it, if you wish).

We hope that these changes to Insert mode will allow many more Dorico users to use it with confidence and unlock more of its power as an assistive tool for composing as well as for fixing mistakes when copying.

Melodic and rhythmic transformations

In the same spirit of making Dorico a more powerful and creative environment for composing and coming up with new ideas, Dorico 4 introduces a suite of tools for performing melodic and rhythmic transformations, all of which can be accessed either via the new Write > Transform menu, or using the rechristened note tools popover, Shift+I.

All of the common musical transformations are covered – inversion, retrograde, rotation, repetition – and all of them can be performed, either independently or together, to pitches and rhythms. It’s also possible to specify a fixed mapping for existing pitches (for example, to specify that every existing F#4 should become a Bb5), and also to transform the scale of a passage of music (for example, to perform a modal transposition from minor or major, or to any one of nearly two dozen scales from the familiar to the more exotic).

Some of these tools are included in other music notation software, typically as plug-ins, but their deep integration into Dorico’s existing note input and editing tools makes them more powerful than similar tools in other software: for example, all other notations – including dynamics, slurs, clefs, octave lines, playing techniques, and so on – are handled as part of the operation. And they are incredibly fast to summon via the Shift+I popover. Try selecting some music and typing rot2 or c maj to e maj or ret.

A couple of other small but notable improvements to note input and editing that have already become ingrained in my own habits are the ability to convert notes to and from grace notes simply by hitting / or clicking the grace note button in the notes toolbox on the left-hand side in Write mode, and the ability to switch the voice of existing notes simply by hitting V, or to switch them into a new voice by typing Shift+V.

MIDI import improvements

The second of three areas where Dorico 4 introduces something that we discussed at the very beginning of our design process is in its handling of importing MIDI files. Around a decade ago, Audio Impressions released an application called Notation Switchblade, which aimed to intelligently interpret MIDI files and convert them into MusicXML files that were more suitable for further work in a music notation application. This wasn’t necessarily about transcription, i.e. the exact quantisation and note spelling decisions that are needed to determine the note values that should be used for the notes in the MIDI file, but rather about trying to understand what the notes in the MIDI file represented in terms of the instruments used, and changes in playing technique, articulation, and section size, then producing a MusicXML file that would give the orchestrator or arranger a head start by encoding these properties as metadata in the MusicXML file.

At the time, it seemed like this would be a natural feature for a music notation application itself to have, and when we began planning Dorico we talked about how we could approach this, in particular thinking about how composers tend to use the same project template, or perhaps evolved versions of the same basic template, for multiple projects, so if we could build up an understanding of that template, subsequent imports from that template would be quicker. These templates often use multiple tracks for individual instruments, with various playing techniques on separate independent tracks. It should be possible to identify which tracks together combine to describe the music to be played by a single instrument or section of instruments, and combine that music at the time of import, rather than requiring the user to laboriously combine music from separate staves after import. Similarly, MIDI files will often have a single track that represents multiple instruments, because the composer chose to play chords as a kind of shorthand, and this track needs to be separated into individual instruments. It should be possible to explode such tracks automatically onto multiple instruments as a starting point.

Unfortunately, this aspect of our plans had to go on the back burner as we built out other areas of the software, and a similar idea has since found its way into Sibelius (introduced in September 2019). Now it’s our turn to build on these principles. The result is a powerful workflow for importing MIDI data, coupled with some very significant improvements in the quality of the transcription of the MIDI data itself.

When you open a MIDI file, a dialog appears that allows you to determine what should be done with every track in the file: it shows you the name of the track, how many notes are sounding simultaneously (which can help to identify tracks that encompass multiple instruments), and how many notes are in the track as a whole (so you can identify empty tracks to exclude them). Dorico will try to guess what instrument might be represented by each track, and you can quickly correct those guesses. Each correction you make is remembered in Dorico’s track memory, so it can make the correct choice automatically the next time it encounters a track with the same name.

Once you need to move beyond simple one-to-one mappings, you can show the advanced editor, which allows you to map a single track to multiple instruments, or direct multiple tracks, perhaps each one representing a different combination of playing techniques or articulations, to a single instrument.

At the bottom of the dialog are all of the transcription options, and a quick browse through those options will reveal several new capabilities in Dorico’s transcription of MIDI data: in addition to improvements in piano pedaling handling, it will now create slurs automatically for legato passages, detect trills and tremolos (replacing their many notes with the appropriate music symbol), and detect grace notes. Beyond the ability to create a wider range of notations automatically, perhaps the most significant improvement is that Dorico can now automatically detect and separate multi-voice textures. These transcription improvements also apply to real-time recording as well as MIDI import.

Library menu and Library Manager

The new Library Manager is the third functional area where Dorico 4 takes another big step towards our original conception of the application. Dorico has a formidable array of options for customising the appearance of your music, and as the application has grown in sophistication over the past five years, the challenge of achieving a consistent set of customisations across multiple projects has likewise grown.

Part of that challenge is simply knowing where to look for a particular option, and we have tried to improve that by reorganising Dorico’s menus in this release, adding a new Library menu that is available in all modes, gathering together not only the five main options dialogs (Engraving Options, Layout Options, Notation Options, Note Input Options and Playback Options) but also all of the dialogs that allow you to edit the appearance of items in your score (most of which came from the Engrave menu), and those related to how the project sounds (from the Play menu). Taken all together, the Library menu should now be your first destination when you are thinking about changing anything about the appearance of your project. (The new jump bar – about which a little more below – can also be helpful, as you can type (for example) “bar num” into the jump bar, and the pages related to bar numbers in each of the options dialogs – Engraving Options, Layout Options, and Notation Options – will be listed.)

Another part of that challenge is that Dorico has not provided a method to import settings from one project into another – until now, with the arrival of the Library Manager.

When we started working on Dorico, one of the areas of the application that all of us had been working on prior to coming to Steinberg that we felt was most in need of a different approach was the importing of house style data. When importing a house style, you couldn’t get any sense of what the impact of the import would be, and you had very limited granularity in terms of choosing what categories of options and items should be imported. Although this has been very modestly improved in that application in the years since it passed into the stewardship of a new team, the same fundamental problems exist.

We wanted to make it possible to see at a glance what the differences between the settings in your current project and the project from which you are importing settings, and we wanted to make it possible to import settings at a much more granular level – ideally down to the level of individual options, or individual styled items (like paragraph styles, playing techniques, and so on). We also wanted to make it possible to selectively return settings and appearances back to the factory default settings.

The result is the new Library Manager dialog, which allows you to explore the options and appearance settings for your project in minute detail. By default, it shows the differences between the current project and the factory library, but you can drag another Dorico project in to the area at the top of the dialog to show the differences between the current project and the dropped project. If you want to home in on, say, the engraving options for slurs, it’s quick and easy to do, and you can simply import the individual settings you are interested in with a few clicks.

There are more improvements coming to the Library Manager in future maintenance updates to Dorico 4, but we hope that you will already find it helpful in managing the settings across multiple projects. It’s also worth mentioning that Dorico 4 includes the ability for you to create a new project template from any existing project, and have that template appear in the Hub window, with all of your preferred settings included.

Jump bar

Dorico has always been quite a keyboard-centric application, with its unique system of popovers and deeply-customisable key commands making it possible to accomplish practically any task using only the keyboard. In the same spirit as these capabilities, the new jump bar is a little bit like a Spotlight or launch bar for Dorico: simply hit J to open it. Then you can access any available command simply by typing part of its name. The jump bar keeps track of which commands you use most often, and after hitting J to open it, you can choose from the five most frequently-used commands with the up and down arrow keys. Or you can simply hit Return after hitting J to execute the last command you invoked from the jump bar.

In addition to being able to execute commands, you can also use the jump bar to navigate through your project. After showing it with J, type Alt+G (Windows) or Ctrl+2 (Mac) to switch to “go to” mode, and then you can navigate to any bar, rehearsal mark, or flow within the current layout. For example, typing f3b21 will go to bar 21 in the third flow in the current layout; typing rg will go to rehearsal letter G; p45 will go to page 45, and so on.

Along with the reorganisation of the Library menu, the jump bar is designed to allow you to work more quickly and discover more of the capabilities of the software: if you’re not sure where to find a particular option, try typing something into the jump bar. We welcome your feedback on how useful you find the jump bar, and any ideas you might have for how to further extend its usefulness in future.

Steinberg Licensing

No discussion of Dorico 4 would be complete without mentioning that it is the first product to make use of the brand new Steinberg Licensing system. Dorico 4 no longer uses the eLicenser system, and you no longer need to use a hardware USB-eLicenser if you want to run your software on more than one computer. From Dorico 4, you can use your single-user license on up to three computers as simply as signing in to the new Steinberg Activation Manager utility with your Steinberg ID email address and password. And if you need to move Dorico to a new computer, simply deactivate it from one of the computers on which it is currently activated, and sign in on another.

There are more capabilities yet to come in Steinberg Licensing – in particular, the initial version released today does not support multi-user licensing for businesses and educational institutions. But that will be coming later in 2022, and we’ll be sure to shout about it when it arrives.

And so much more

In this introductory post we can only really scratch the surface of the new features and improvements in Dorico 4. To give you a sense of the scale of this release, here are just a few more of the new tools for you to enjoy in the new version:

• The on-screen Keyboard, Fretboard and Drum Pads instruments introduced in Dorico for iPad make their way into Dorico on the desktop
• Instrument filters in galley view allow you to focus on a subset of the instruments in your layout, and quickly recall saved filters via the on-screen overlay or key commands
• You can now save your own project templates, and save your own custom ensembles in the revamped ensemble picker
• Dorico now automatically orders instruments in the score, and allows you to denote one or more players as a soloist, which moves them to the right place in the score order and brackets and names them appropriately
• You can now define full or partial capos for fretted instruments, display transposed notation, appropriate tablature, and transposed chord symbols, either in addition to or instead of the main chord symbols
• Numbered bar regions allow you to indicate repeated bars in part layouts, with comprehensive options for frequency and appearance of the bar count
• New VST plug-ins, including the powerful SuperVision visual monitoring plug-in and the VST Amp Rack and VST Bass Amp guitar amp modeling plug-ins
• Comprehensive new tools for accidental spelling, including new options for default spelling in atonal key signatures, and new tools to manage differences in enharmonic spelling between full score and part layouts
• A new Paste Articulations command allows you to paste articulations independently of notes
• Audio export now supports the lossless FLAC format and a wider range of bit-depth options for WAV export.
• It’s now possible to adjust the thickness and separation of individual beams, and to create centred beams spanning any interval
• New commands to move bars to the next or previous system make casting off faster than ever, along with simpler system and page breaks, and the ability to lock the formatting of the whole layout with a single click
• Chord diagrams can now display fingerings either within the dots on the strings or outside the fretboard grid
• Chord symbols can now be parenthesised, new properties provide greater flexibility in their appearance, and a new Generate Chord Symbols From Notes feature can automatically add chord symbols to selected music
• Clefs and key signatures can be hidden automatically after the first system to mimic handwritten lead sheets
• It is now possible to add rhythmic cues to percussion kits, and determine how fermatas should appear in cues
• When you select and nudge items in Engrave mode, they now show crosshairs to aid in alignment
• Figured bass now includes comprehensive support for bracketing, including bracketing individual figures and accidentals, or whole runs of figures
• You can now make an exact duplicate of an existing layout, retaining all Engrave mode and formatting edits, ideal for speeding up the production of layouts for alternative transpositions for an instrument
• Automatic substitution of missing music symbols when using a music font other than Bravura
• Fully-editable rests in percussion kits, and greatly improved handling of tuplets when inputting and editing in percussion kits
• New options for project activation, so you can determine whether Dorico should load sounds automatically when switching between multiple open projects
• Greatly expanded options for staff labels, including vertical player group labels with automatic brackets, and more options for handling instrument transpositions
• A new dialog that makes it much easier to insert music symbols in text
• Engraving improvements for dynamics, rhythm dots, lyrics, multi-bar rests

…and there are more besides, not to mention more than 220 fixes for problems reported in Dorico 3.5 and earlier versions.

In addition, Dorico Elements 4 also gets some big changes today: the player limit has been doubled from 12 players to 24, allowing you to write for much larger ensembles; it now includes the graphic editing tool in Engrave mode, so you can make fine adjustments to the appearance of your scores; it also now includes the Notation Options dialog, providing much greater flexibility over how your music is notated; and a new Library > Chord Symbols dialog brings to Dorico Elements all of the options from the Engraving Options dialog in Dorico Pro relating to chord symbols.

I hope you will take the time to read the comprehensive Version History PDF, which runs to more than 100 pages. You will, I think, find something interesting and useful on practically every page. Likewise, do check out all 18 of the videos that Anthony has produced describing many of the new features in Dorico 4 in detail: settle down with a cup of tea or coffee (or perhaps something stronger) and allow his dulcet tones to guide you through the riches on offer.

System requirements

Pricing and availability

Dorico Pro 4, Dorico Elements 4 and Dorico SE 4 are all available from today.

An update to Dorico Pro 4 from Dorico Pro 3.5 costs €99 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $99.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency. If you are currently running Dorico Pro 3 or earlier, the update to Dorico Pro 4 costs €159 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $159.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency.

An update to Dorico Elements 4 from any previous version of Dorico Elements costs €29.99 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $29.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency.

If you currently have any version of Dorico Elements and would like to upgrade to Dorico Pro 4, please note that it is not yet possible to upgrade from Dorico Elements to Dorico Pro: these upgrades will be available soon (this post will be updated when they become available).

If you are looking to buy Dorico Pro 4 for the first time, you can purchase a new retail license for €579 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $579.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency.

If you currently have a full license for Finale (any version, from 1.0 to 27, but only for the full Finale product, not cut-down versions like PrintMusic, Allegro, Notepad, etc.) or Sibelius Ultimate (in its current confusingly-named version from 2019.4 or later, or under its former name as simply Sibelius from version 1.0 to 8.x and them up to 2019.1, but not for cut-down versions like Sibelius Student, Sibelius First, etc.), you can buy a Dorico Pro 4 crossgrade for €279 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $279.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency.

If you are a teacher or student in full-time education, you can buy Dorico Pro 4 at a special educational price of €359 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $359.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency. If in addition to qualifying for educational pricing you also have a suitable Finale or Sibelius license, you can buy a crossgrade to Dorico Pro 4 at an even lower price of €179 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $179.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency.

If you want to buy a multi-user Dorico 4 license for your business or educational institution, we are continuing to sell multi-user licenses for Dorico 3.5 for the time being, while we work on the necessary features to support these kinds of usage scenarios in Steinberg Licensing. We will provide more news as soon as we can. Any new multi-user licenses for Dorico 3.5 that were activated on or after 25 August 2021 will be eligible for a free update to Dorico 4 when multi-user licensing support is available, later in 2022.

Dorico Elements 4 is available for €99.99 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $99.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency, and if you qualify for educational pricing, it costs just €66.99 (inc. German VAT at 19%), $66.99 US, or equivalent in your local currency. If you are using the free Dorico SE and would like to upgrade to Dorico Elements, click the Upgrade button in the Hub window to get the best possible price.

Updates and upgrades are only available for purchase from the Steinberg online shop. New licenses, including educational licenses and crossgrades, can be purchased either from the Steinberg online shop or from any authorised Steinberg reseller. All prices shown above are the manufacturer’s suggested retail prices, and in particular you may find slightly lower prices on new licenses from our reseller partners. Please remember that local sales taxes will apply to your purchase price.

Dorico SE 4, of course, is completely free, and you can download your free copy here.

Grace period updates

If you first activated Dorico Pro 3.5 or Dorico Elements 3.5 (or indeed an earlier version) on or after 25 August 2021, you are eligible for a free grace period update to the corresponding version 4 product.

To check your eligibility, simply run eLicenser Control Center on the computer where Dorico 3.5 is installed (or where your USB-eLicenser with your Dorico 3.5 license is installed is connected), and allow eLCC to perform its standard maintenance task. If you are eligible for the grace period update, you will be shown a prompt: click this to be redirected to the Steinberg web site. You will be prompted to sign in with your Steinberg ID if necessary, and then you simply click the button shown to claim your grace period update. You will then receive an email to your registered Steinberg ID email address containing your Download Access Code (DAC). Run Steinberg Download Assistant and enter your DAC there to download Dorico 4.

If you bought Dorico 3.5 from the Steinberg online shop in the End of Summer Sale between 25 August and 20 September 2021, do not be alarmed if eLicenser Control Center does not inform you that you are eligible for a grace period update. Some customers who bought during the End of Summer Sale will instead be sent a Download Access Code directly by our colleagues at AskNet, who manage the Steinberg online shop on our behalf. Please allow 5-7 business days from today for your DAC to arrive. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused by the delay in the delivery of your grace period Dorico 4 update.

Trial version

Free 30-day trial versions of Dorico Pro 4 and Dorico Elements 4 will be available soon (this post will be updated when they become available).

What’s next

Thanks for reading this far. On behalf of everybody at Steinberg who has worked hard to bring Dorico 4 to you, thank you for your support and evangelism of Dorico. We hope that you will find plenty of useful improvements in the new version, and we are looking forward to bringing you more new functionality this year. Our next priority is to release an update to Dorico for iPad, bringing more of the Dorico 4 features to iPadOS, and we expect to release some further minor updates to Dorico 4 on desktop, too.

Please do let us know what you think of Dorico 4. You can join us on our forum, or contact us via our social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We look forward to seeing and hearing what you will do with Dorico 4!