Dorico Pro 6.2.30 — Mac version

Version 6.2.30 includes 30 VST 3 processors right out of the box.

Wiggly glissando lines — drawn with the traditional trill wiggle glyph or a line style pulled from your project.

Sequencer-style MIDI editor — a piano-roll view for tweaking performances without leaving the score.

Tuplets across beats — notated cleanly, no fiddly workarounds needed. The same goes for microtonal passages and music without stems.

Independent voice playback — for instruments routed to Cantai, switch this on from the Track Inspector in Play mode and each voice gets its own lane.

Pedal line export — sustain and sostenuto pedal markings now travel with the file, and hidden tuplet brackets stay hidden on export. MusicXML round-trips had a tidy-up this release too.

A clean-slate layout engine versus decades-old code

Dorico Pro arrived late to the notation party, but it walked in with a clean slate. Sibelius and Finale had decades of legacy code to lug around — Dorico didn't. That shows most in automatic layout. Where Sibelius needs magnetic layout tweaks and Finale demands manual nudging, Dorico's collision avoidance works from the first note you drop. Engravers who once spent afternoons shifting dynamics now let the software sort it while they get on with the music.

MuseScore is the community heavyweight — free, capable, and vastly improved in version 4. For a school brass band arrangement or a quick lead sheet it's hard to fault. But when you're preparing a full orchestral score for publishing, Dorico's handling of condensing, divisi, and cue labels pulls ahead. MuseScore can do much of it; Dorico does it with less swearing.

Finale is officially sunset now, so most comparisons feel like eulogies. Plenty of seasoned copyists still swear by their muscle memory in Speedy Entry, but Dorico's popover-based input — hit Shift+P for playing techniques, Shift+D for dynamics — becomes second nature fast. Sibelius users often say the same about its ribbon, but Dorico's single-window ethos keeps everything within reach without panels fighting for screen space on a 13-inch MacBook.

Transposing keys and printing cheat sheets mid-crisis

Picture a musical director three days before rehearsals start. The conductor's score is locked, but the drummer needs a cheat sheet and the second keyboard part has to drop an octave because the actor can't hit the high note anymore. In Dorico Pro, they open the full score, create a new drum part layout from the existing percussion staves, and print it — no extracting, no separate file. The keyboard transposition is a single staff property change. By elevenses both parts are on the band's music stands, and the arranger still has time to walk the dog before the afternoon production meeting.

Later that week, the sound designer sends over a Cantai routing setup. Independent voice playback means the arranger can audition the string lines with different articulation maps on voice one and two, catch a muddy passage, and re-voice it before the first downbeat. That kind of feedback loop — notation to playback to revision — used to take a round trip through a DAW.

Opening your old Sibelius files via MusicXML

Can I open my old Sibelius files in Dorico? Yes, via MusicXML. The import has improved steadily — this 6.2.30 release fixes several MusicXML round-trip quirks — but expect to spend a little time on formatting. Complex scores with lots of manual positioning will need the most attention. Simple charts usually land cleanly.

Do I need a beefy Mac to run it? Not especially. Apple Silicon machines handle Dorico comfortably, and Intel Macs from the macOS 12 era still pull their weight. The 1,500 built-in sounds load from disk rather than hammering the CPU, though a large orchestral template with multiple VST 3 instruments will appreciate 16 GB of RAM.

Is the learning curve as steep as people say? It's different rather than difficult. If you've spent twenty years in Sibelius or Finale, the first week feels like writing with your other hand. Stick with the popover system (Shift+N for notes, Shift+M for meter) and resist the urge to mouse everything. By day four most users stop reaching for old keyboard shortcuts.

What about third-party sound libraries? Dorico Pro loads any VST 3 instrument or effects processor. The 30 included VST 3 processors cover bread-and-butter mixing — EQ, compression, reverb — but you can drop in Spitfire, Orchestral Tools, or whatever sits in your plug-in folder. Expression maps are already built for most major libraries.

Where Dorico fits in a working setup

Dorico Pro doesn't try to be a DAW, but it talks to them. Export stems as audio, send MIDI to Logic Pro for detailed mock-up work, or print parts as PDFs for a copyist. The sequencer-style piano roll inside Dorico handles quick MIDI edits without leaving the score — quantise a sloppy real-time recording or nudge velocities on a harp glissando — but for full production work you'll still want a separate DAW.

On the macOS side, Dorico plays well with Quick Look (preview scores in Finder), supports Dark Mode without squinting at pale staves, and respects the system-wide colour profile for accurate print work. Scores exported as PDF carry embedded fonts, so a conductor's iPad shows exactly what you see on screen — no missing glyphs on the podium.

If you're deep in the Steinberg ecosystem already — Cubase, Nuendo, WaveLab — Dorico shares enough DNA that moving between them feels familiar. The Play mode borrows Cubase's mixer thinking, and tempo track handling follows the same logic. For everyone else, it's a notation-first tool that happens to sound good enough for a late-night composing session when you can't face booting up the full DAW rig.

• macOS 12 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel Mac