Dorico Pro 5

Professional composition and music notation software for macOS and Windows

Do more with Dorico Pro

Looking for the ultimate in power and customization for your music notation and composition needs? Look no further than Dorico Pro. Designed for professionals in the art music and media music industries, as well as teachers and professors in tertiary education. Dorico Pro offers a deep feature set and unique features you won’t find anywhere else. Take your music to the next level with advanced workflows, unrivalled customization options, and the ability to produce publication-quality music automatically. Discover what sets Dorico Pro apart and unlock your full creative potential.

Dorico Does It Better

There are other music notation applications – but none of them matches up to Dorico in terms of musical intelligence, power, and flexibility. Here are just ten ways that #DoricoDoesItBetter

Automatic condensed conductor scores

In a conductor’s score, music for multiple players is condensed onto a smaller number of staves, reducing the number of staves on each page and allowing each staff to be larger, aiding legibility. Producing a conductor’s score has always been laborious and time-consuming, requiring a great deal of planning and revision throughout the whole process, with almost no assistance from software – until now. Dorico Pro can create an intelligently-formatted conductor’s score with a single click, while still maintaining complete and correct instrumental parts. Profound step changes in productivity in music notation software come along perhaps once a decade: this is one of them.

Smart linked cues

Cues help the performers keep their place in the music by showing music from another player before important entries or solos. They are crucial – but adding cues to instrumental parts is one of the most time-consuming aspects of preparing performance materials. Dorico Pro is the only scoring software to link cues dynamically to their source material. So if you need to revise the work, you don’t need to lift a finger to ensure the cues are updated: it’s completely automatic.

Library Manager

Dorico Pro offers thousands of ways for you to customize the look and layout of your projects, and keeping track of the changes you have made from the factory settings or between different projects is difficult. The Library Manager in Dorico Pro provides a way for you to see the differences between the options and styles in two projects at a glance, and selectively apply changes from one to the other.

Sophisticated staff management

The most demanding score layout tasks are transformed with Dorico Pro’s smart staff management tools. Complex divided string sections are easy to manage, including automatically handling changes between unison and divided sections. Add or remove staves from any instrument at any point, making laying out even the most complex music for keyboard and mallet percussion simple and fast. Add ossia staves above or below any instrument, to show alternatives, ornament realizations, and more. And using Manual Staff Visibility, you can hide and show instruments at any point, whether they have music at that point.

Generate Notes from Chord Symbols

Only Dorico Pro can generate notes from chord symbols, producing well-voiced chords with sensible voice leading, avoiding as far as possible parallel fifths and octaves – unless you want them – and able to do some remarkably clever things, such as use a rhythm from one instrument as a pattern for the generated notes, and even take hints from notes you have added to guide the resulting voicings. This feature can save hours of mechanical work in creating the framework for your arrangement.

DTP-style page layout

Dorico Pro is the only music notation software with powerful desktop publishing features for music layout. Every page has a template that defines the precise position of every item, so it’s easy to determine where page numbers, titles, headers, and footers appear, and you can create your own templates to put your stamp on every project. For complex layouts, you can freely mix music, text, and graphics on any page. Page template sets can be imported and exported so it’s easy to move them between projects.

Endless customization

Music looks beautiful by default in Dorico, following in the finest traditions established over centuries by the major music publishers. The perfect page of music is the sum of thousands of tiny details, and only Dorico Pro has the depth to allow you to change every one of those details. With thousands of engraving options spread across more than 50 carefully categorized pages, you are in total control of the design and placement of every item on every page. And that is only the start: Dorico Pro provides you with dedicated editors for instruments, noteheads, music symbols, playing techniques, music and text fonts, and more.

More sounds and effects plug-ins

On top of the hundreds of production-ready sounds included with HALion Sonic 7, and more than 30 high-quality effects processors, Dorico Pro also includes HALion Symphonic Orchestra, a versatile and high-performance orchestral sound library, advanced amp modelling plug-ins for shaping guitar and bass sounds, and SuperVision, a fully customizable, multi-meter audio analyzer plug-in. You can choose from several different modules for level, spectral, phase and waveform analysis, creating your own custom layout with up to nine module slots to give you a supremely accurate visual picture of your sound.

Switch to Dorico Pro and save

If you already use Finale or Sibelius Ultimate, you can add Dorico Pro to your toolbox for a special price via our competitive crossgrade offer. You don’t have to give up your existing software: just provide proof of your existing Finale or Sibelius Ultimate license, and save nearly 50% on the retail price.

New in Dorico 5

New orchestral sounds, faster workflow, more customization

Dorico 5 includes a new orchestral sound library, brings more expressive playback, and makes it easy to produce more life-like performances with a dynamic stereo soundstage. Easily trigger drum patterns with the included Groove Agent SE plug-in.

Customize your score with a comprehensive instrument editor and eight new music font families, and boost your workflow with scrub playback, mouse note editing, multiple item creation, double-tap note input, and many more improvements throughout the application.

Iconica Sketch orchestral library

Iconica Sketch offers you a complete orchestra with 34 different instruments and 140 articulations, seamlessly integrated with Dorico 5. The original recordings from Iconica have been carefully selected and re-mastered to deliver a well-balanced, high-quality orchestral experience, tailored to instantly create modern and cinematic scores. Designed to be lightweight and high-performance, the whole library takes up less than 5GB.

Stage and Space templates

Dorico comes with dozens of powerful effects processors to sculpt your sound, and Dorico 5’s new Space and Stage templates make it simple to try out different configurations: use a simple visual interface to move instruments on the virtual stage, and Dorico automatically translates that into pan and reverb settings. Experiment with different rooms, and quickly recall any previous state by creating a mixer snapshot. Reorder and rename outputs, create send buses, and more.

The idea behind Iconica Sketch

Iconica Sketch was designed to give musicians at every level a complete, professional orchestra at their fingertips, which is compact (4.6 GB) in size and extremely fast to load. Based on original ultra-high quality, exceedingly detailed recordings from the Orchestral Tools for Iconica library, Steinberg created a new mix which is tailored to instantly create modern and cinematic scores and enrich modern pop productions.

Pitch contour emphasis

Dorico reads the notations in your score the way a human musician does, automatically switching to different articulations and playing techniques using whatever sample library you choose. Building on these foundations, Dorico’s playback is more expressive than ever, using sophisticated algorithms to breathe life into phrases in the same way human musicians do. No longer do you need great keyboard skills to bring your notated music to life.

Voice balancing for polyphonic instruments

Human musicians use their experience and intuition to interpret the complex polyphonic textures of music written for piano, keyboard, harp, and mallet percussion, emphasizing melodies and bass lines above material that provides texture and harmony – and do all of this without direct, detailed instructions in the music notation. Dorico 5’s new voice balancing algorithms allow it to come closer than ever to the expressive nuance of human performance, completely automatically. It can even emphasize fugue subjects in contrapuntal music.

MIDI triggers

Dorico’s new MIDI trigger regions play a note or chord that doesn’t appear in the score for a period determined by you. This is especially useful for triggering MIDI patterns in plug-ins like Groove Agent SE, or other pattern-based instruments such as TGuitar. If you’re writing for a real drummer or guitarist, you don’t need to write out their part in full: give them the structure of the piece, a few rhythmic cues, and chord symbols, and they’ll take care of the rest. But if you want to have some realistic playback without spending a lot of time and effort writing out music that won’t ultimately be played by your human musicians, pattern-based plug-ins can save a lot of time.

Scrub playback

Dorico 5 introduces a new scrub playback feature that makes it easy to audition the whole ensemble or a single instrument at any point and move forwards or backwards through the playback at any speed. This is invaluable for checking harmonies, finding wrong notes, and focusing on specific moments in your music.

Holds and pauses playback

Dorico now intelligently plays back fermatas, caesuras, and breath marks, bringing a new level of expressiveness to the performance of your music. Tweak the default playback effect for each type of hold and pause, and edit the performance of individual pauses in the Key Editor. Glissando playback is improved too, and can now use continuous pitch bend where appropriate.

Smart divisi – now even smarter

Dorico Pro’s smart divisi features make it easy to write complex divided parts for section players, typically strings, but there were some awkward corner cases that weren’t handled perfectly. We’ve gone back to the drawing board and revamped divisi, leading to more stable results, especially at the transitions between unison and divisi music, and involving system items like time and key signatures.

Multiple item creation

Dorico 5 overhauls item creation from a selection: you can now create multiple items at the same time, on multiple instruments, and even at different positions on each instrument.

Instrument editor

Dorico includes definitions for over 600 pitched and unpitched instruments, but no database can capture every variation of instruments or include all cultures and historical periods. With Dorico Pro 5, you can modify or create instrument definitions to suit your needs, and easily reuse them in future projects. Freely assign instruments to existing or new families, and create your own instrument score orders.

Live editing

Dorico 5 includes new features to quickly edit and copy music using the mouse. You can drag selected notes to alter their pitch, or drag them to new rhythmic positions, with a live overlay to show you where the notes will be moved to. Interacting directly with the mouse makes it easier and quicker to sculpt your music, whether you do it directly in the notation or in the Key Editor.

MusicXML import and export

MusicXML is the widely supported interchange format for exchanging music notation data between applications. Dorico 5 brings enriched support for importing harmonics, playing techniques, ornaments, holds and pauses, and more. MusicXML export is also greatly expanded, with page layout, music and text font information, holds and pauses, ornaments and trills, arpeggio signs, and much more included in exported files.

New music fonts

Dorico 5 includes no fewer than eight new music font families to bring greater variety to the look of your projects: four new handwritten-style fonts, and four engraved fonts, all available at the click of a single button.

System Requirements

macOS:

• macOS Ventura, macOS Monterey, macOS Big Sur, macOS Catalina, macOS Sonoma
• Intel® Core™ i5 (mid 2013 or later) or Apple silicon
• RAM Minimum: 8GB
• Hard Disk Free space: 12GB

Windows:

• Windows 11 (64-bit), Windows 10 (64-bit)
• 64-bit Intel or AMD multi-core (Intel i5 or faster recommended)
• RAM Minimum: 8GB
• Hard Disk Free space: 12GB