Dorico 5.1.60 update now available

We're pleased to announce the availability of a new maintenance update for Dorico Pro 5, Dorico Elements 5, Dorico SE, and Dorico for iPad, bringing them to version 5.1.60. This update introduces official support for macOS 15 Sequoia, restoring support for Quick Look in the Finder, fixes nearly 50 bugs, introduces performance improvements for large projects that use condensing, and has a few other little treats in store. Read on for more information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAGdCiigLyM

macOS 15 Sequoia support

In September, Apple released the latest version of macOS 15, Sequoia. Dorico 5.1.60 brings full support for the latest Mac desktop operating system. In Sequoia, Apple have removed support for the original Quick Look API, so applications that want to provide Quick Look previews for their documents need to provide new Quick Look App Extensions that are compatible with macOS 12 and later.

Dorico 5.1.60 introduces new App Extensions for Quick Look and for showing thumbnails in the Finder. After installing Dorico 5.1.60, you should be able to open a Quick Look preview for a Dorico project simply by tapping Space in the Finder, and when using sufficiently large icon views in Finder windows, Dorico projects should show thumbnails directly in their icons.

If you find that Quick Look isn't working, run System Settings, then choose Login Items & Extensions, and click the little i button next to Quick Look. In the panel that appears, you should see Dorico 5 listed, with two items: DoricoQuickLookExtensionMac and DoricoThumbnailExtensionMac. Make sure both of these are activated.

Remember that not every Dorico project will show a Quick Look preview: in particular, projects last saved in versions of Dorico older than Dorico 4 will not have previews; and if you have deactivated the option to include graphical previews when saving in File > Project Info, no preview will be included in the project.

Pitch before duration input

We have been thrilled to welcome many thousands of Finale users into the Dorico fold over the last month or so, and look forward to welcoming thousands more in the months to come. Finale users of long standing tend to gravitate towards the Speedy Entry input method, which has been part of Finale since its very first version. Dorico introduced its own spin on Speedy Entry in version 3.5 back in 2020, called pitch before duration input, but one aspect of Speedy Entry that Dorico 3.5 did not copy was the use of the arrow keys to adjust the input pitch in the Speedy Entry frame.

In pitch before duration input, the pitch to be input when you specify the duration is indicated by a shadow note drawn on the staff. You can set the pitch of the shadow note by typing the letter name of the note you want to input, or by playing on your MIDI keyboard, or using the arrow keys – though you need to hold Alt to move the shadow note up and down.

At the time of Dorico 3.5's release, we heard from some former Finale users that they would welcome the ability to adjust the shadow note pitch using only the arrow keys, but we were reluctant to add this capability. Our approach in Dorico is that arrow keys alone should never edit anything: they are always intended for navigation, not for editing. In order to change the pitch of a note in Dorico, you must hold down Alt and press the up or down arrow key (and add Command on macOS or Ctrl on Windows to move by an octave).

However, in light of the many new Dorico users who have come from Finale, we have introduced some new commands in Dorico 5.1.60 that will allow Speedy Entry aficionados to set things up such that the shadow note can be moved with the up/down arrow keys alone. Four new commands have been added to the Note Input category in the Key Commands page of Preferences: map Raise Shadow Note Pitch by Step to up arrow, and map Lower Shadow Note Pitch by Step to down arrow. We also recommend you map Move Up and Move Down (also in the Note Input category) to Alt+up arrow and Alt+down arrow respectively, so that it is still possible to move the caret to different staves. You may also wish to map Raise Shadow Note Pitch by Octave and Lower Shadow Note Pitch by Octave. Having made these changes, after activating note input with pitch before duration, you can use the up/down arrow keys to adjust the pitch of the shadow note.

Furthermore, a new option Play changes of shadow note pitch in pitch before duration input has been added to the Note Input and Editing page of Preferences. If you prefer only to hear the pitch of the note when you commit it to the score by hitting a duration key, which is how Speedy Entry behaves in Finale, deactivate this option.

MusicXML import

Dorico 5.1.60 now imports system and frame breaks from MusicXML files by default. If you want to disable this behavior, deactivate Import system and frame breaks on the MusicXML Import page of Preferences before importing your MusicXML file. This can make quite a big difference when proofreading the resulting Dorico project after importing a MusicXML file from Finale, as it makes it easier to eyeball the differences between the original Finale document and the new Dorico project.

Dorico does not yet import information about whether a staff is hidden in a specific system, so it is still possible for the resulting layout not to match the original file exactly. We plan to add this in a future update.

Pasting lyrics

It has long been possible to copy lyrics to the clipboard, either directly from a selected line of lyrics in Dorico, or from an external text editor, and then paste them into Dorico one word or syllable at a time – provided you have marked up the original text with hyphens beforehand. (A tip: ChatGPT is remarkably good at adding hyphens to text using dictionary hyphenation, so one quick way to add correct hyphenation to your text is to ask ChatGPT to do this for you.)

However, this feature only worked for western, Latin scripts. If you pasted text in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, Dorico would paste the whole text at once. In Dorico 5.1.60, we have now enabled automatic pasting of CJK text one ideograph at a time. Simply copy the whole text to the clipboard, start lyric input via the Shift+L popover, and paste: the first ideograph will be pasted, and the popover automatically advanced to the next note onset, ready to paste the next one.

Performance improvements

When working with large-scale projects with many players, long flows, and using Dorico's unique and smart features like condensing and divisi, editing can slow down considerably due to the increased computation required. However, upon examining some particularly heavy user projects, we were able to identify some cases where edits towards the end of long flows could cause Dorico to incorrectly mark a much larger range of music as invalidated than expected, causing every edit to prompt Dorico to recalculate significant swathes of the flow.

We have been able to correct a few of these cases in Dorico 5.1.60, which should result in edits like inputting or repitching notes, adding dynamics, tempos, rehearsal marks, etc., in such projects feeling somewhat snappier in this update.

We know there is still a long way to go to make Dorico feel snappier when working with larger projects, but we hope the improvements in Dorico 5.1.60 will nevertheless be welcomed by users.

Other improvements

As always, we recommend reading the Dorico 5.1.60 Version History PDF for complete details of all the improvements and fixes in this update. A few more highlights for your consideration:

The note tools popover now allows you to change the inversion of selected chords: for example, to transform a root position triad into a second inversion triad by transposing the top note down an octave, type t top -8; do it again to turn the second inversion triad into a first inversion triad. You can also rotate in the other direction by typing t bottom 8, which transposes the bottom note of the chord up an octave.
A new Toggle Hide Notehead command has been added, which can be mapped to a custom key command or triggered via the jump bar.
It's possible to change the "stickiness" of dragging items in Engrave mode via a new Drag threshold slider in Preferences.
The Help > Check For Updates command has been improved such that it will tell you directly whether an update is available, rather than sending you off to the Steinberg web site to find out for yourself.

This update also brings nearly 50 bug fixes, including fixes for a number of the top crashes reported by the automated crash log collection feature introduced with Dorico 5.

Installing the update

Dorico 5.1.60 is a free update for existing Dorico Pro 5, Dorico Elements 5 and Dorico SE 5 users. If you are currently running Dorico Pro 4 or Dorico Elements 4 or earlier, you can buy an update to Dorico Pro 5 or Dorico Elements 5 from the Steinberg online shop.

Assuming you already have Dorico 5 installed, you can update to Dorico 5.1.60 free of charge. First, quit Dorico and any other Steinberg application that you are running on your computer. We recommend that you run Steinberg Download Assistant, which will automatically update Steinberg Activation Manager to the latest version, along with any other elements of the Steinberg run-time environment (including eLicenser Control Center, Steinberg Library Manager, and MediaBay) that may be outdated on your computer.

Once Steinberg Download Manager has finished updating any required components, go to My Product Downloads in the left-hand list, where you will find Dorico Pro 5, Dorico Elements 5, or Dorico SE 5, depending on which product you have installed. Select this, and on the right-hand side you will see Dorico 5.1.60 Application Installer. Click the Install button immediately to the right. This will download and run the Dorico 5.1.60 installer.

If for any reason you cannot use Steinberg Download Assistant, you can find all the installers you require here.

If you already have Dorico for iPad installed, it will probably update automatically, but if you need to update it manually, you can do so following these steps provided by Apple.

Reminder: eLicenser service ends soon

Before we wrap up this post, a reminder to users who are still on Dorico 3.5 or earlier, which rely on the old eLicenser technology for licensing: the eLicenser servers will be shut down in early 2025. Once the eLicenser server is shut down, you will no longer be able to reactivate your Dorico license on a new computer, and nor will you be able to move your Dorico license from a Soft-eLicenser to a USB-eLicenser.

Furthermore, after the eLicenser server is shut down, you will no longer be able to simply buy an update to the latest version of Dorico in the Steinberg online shop, because the update process requires that the system checks your existing license.

We strongly recommend that you consider updating to the latest version of Dorico before the eLicenser service is shut down. For more information, please visit the Steinberg web site.

What's next

As always, we are hard at work on new developments, and it won't be long before we have more exciting news to share with you. Watch this space!