Steinberg today announced the highly anticipated release of the latest version of its professional scoring software, Dorico 3.5. With updates to the whole family of products — Dorico Pro, Dorico Elements, and the free Dorico SE — there are improvements across every area of the application, building on the ground-breaking features introduced in Dorico 3.0.
Dorico has been designed from the ground up to be a comfortable environment for composing and arranging, and the new input method introduced in Dorico 3.5 provides convenient new tools for trying out ideas during the composition process. Dorico’s step input method has always required you to specify the duration of the note before its pitch, which is very convenient when copying out existing music, but not always convenient when composing. Now you can specify the pitch before duration, allowing you to try out melodies and chords without inputting them, only committing them to the score when you then specify the duration to be used. This new input method will be of particular interest to users of other notation software who want to experience all of Dorico’s powerful and time-saving features, but strongly prefer pitch before duration input: now it’s available in Dorico, too.
Dorico 3.5 expands its support for early music with comprehensive support for figured bass, complete with its own trademark musical intelligence. Figured bass is a shorthand notation for describing harmony that was in wide usage in European music in the 17th and 18th centuries, written using a system of numerals for intervals above the written bass note. Using a dedicated popover, quickly add figures to any bass part, and choose how they should appear with a complete set of engraving options. The figures even adapt automatically to changing the bass note.
Product marketing manager for Dorico, Daniel Spreadbury, said: “We are excited to bring Dorico 3.5 to musicians around the world today. Everything we do is directed towards making it faster and easier to produce music notation that communicates exactly what you want, in exactly the way you want it. The improvements in Dorico 3.5 both allow you to shape your working environment more than ever before, and to achieve better results more quickly than ever.”
Dorico is available from local resellers and through the Steinberg Online Shop. Students and teachers can purchase Dorico Pro 3.5 at the discounted suggested retail price of U.S. $359.99. Users of Finale and Sibelius can buy a Dorico Pro 3.5 crossgrade at the special suggested retail price of U.S. $299.99 (box) or U.S. $279.99 (download), and an educational download for Finale and Sibelius users is available for students and teachers, allowing them to buy Dorico Pro 3.5 for just U.S. $179.99 (box) or U.S. $159.99 (download).
Dorico SE 3.5 is available for free and can be downloaded from the Steinberg website starting from today.
Customers who have activated Dorico 3 editions and earlier versions on or after April 22, 2020, are eligible for a free, downloadable Grace Period update to the latest respective version.
