And remember Sibelius has the same $149 offer. And it is far more Finale user friendly.

I just d/l the Dorico Popover Quick Reference sheet(s). It is 15 pages long hardly user friendly, IMHO, as always.

Not at all. I'm pretty objective in my assessments of both Dorico and Finale.

Ah, no, you're not. Perhaps in your own mind. When we first met on the forums I thought you were a pretty cool guy that wrote "interesting", not my cup of tea music, but interesting. That has changed.

Which part has changed-my being cool or writing interesting music? Inquiring minds want to know.

In terms of objectivity, you do realize you're totally not, right?

Brief update - Dorico has conceded the superiority of Finale by making it possible to input notes the Finale way in the Dorico 5.1.6 update. If you're evaluating or trialing Dorico, or like me you rolled the dice on Dorico yet found the lack of this capability a glaring shortcoming, make sure you watch the release video to see how to configure this.

TBH, I'm not sure I'm understanding the significance of the new update, since I found I could easily move notes up and down a half-step or a whole step or an octave just by using opt-arrow, shift-opt-arrow, and opt-cmd-arrow (on a Mac) and I also do what I did in Finale, which was often to simply drag the note up or down to change pitch. The new update gives the option of remapping the arrow keys to move pitches a half-step in either direction, but then you can't move the caret to a different staff using the arrow keys (you'd have to use opt-arrow instead). I've gotten to rather like hitting shift-arrow to enter notes in multiple staves simultaneously, which is a nice feature I wished Finale had, so for me, I'm not remapping the keys. Dorico already had speedy entry in many ways, such as pitch before duration, and duration before pitch amounts to speedy entry with the caps lock on, which I often did to enter runs of notes in Finale. 

The important part of my response is that these developers are competing for our business. My personal, idiosyncratic needs are not meaningful (though apparently not unique); that Dorico and Muse are responding directly, and Sibelius by price (already a lateral move), are bending over backward to draw us to their platform is.

In terms of objectivity, you do realize you're totally not, right?

Well of course not how could I possibly be right. Oh, lets see, you were a guy like motet that complained about Finale for a long time. Loudly I might affirm.  Now you found your holy grail and of course it has no issues and is wonderful. It's good you found your peace but there are lots of folks that think the way I do, that Dorico isn't all that wonderful and is a mess to learn.

Dorico knows that. Dorico has heard from people like me and that why they come out with the more Speedy Entry, Finale like, note input. Now it's your turn spin it anyway you deem necessary to prove it to yourself you made the right decision in going Dorico.

I spent the money and bought Dorico and Sibelius and I have MuseScore and some others. I am not going Dorico until I have thoroughly checked out these other options As of today Sibelius is the winner barring the expected next MuseScore 5 update.

In about one hour of trying Sibelius I was up and running to about the same level as two weeks of frustration with Dorico. MuseScore simply isn't ready yet. Lilly Pond and some others are a joke.

David M

The important part of my response is that these developers are competing for our business.

Yes they are and if MM had been that way who knows how different things might be. Dorico support and the folks there are wonderful especially Lilly Harris.. They are patient and as helpful as they an be. They know Dorico isn't Finale and isn't anywhere close to working the way Finale does.

Well of course not how could I possibly be right. Oh, lets see, you were a guy like motet that complained about Finale for a long time. Loudly I might affirm.  Now you found your holy grail and of course it has no issues and is wonderful. It's good you found your peace but there are lots of folks that think the way I do, that Dorico isn't all that wonderful and is a mess to learn.

Dorico knows that. Dorico has heard from people like me and that why they come out with the more Speedy Entry, Finale like, note input. Now it's your turn spin it anyway you deem necessary to prove it to yourself you made the right decision in going Dorico.

Dude, I'm not spinning anything. I think you're projecting; you're the one who's constantly reassuring yourself that Finale is totally awesome and everything else largely sucks. I stuck with Finale for over 30 years; if MM hadn't abandoned it and if it didn't have bugs and quirks that clearly will never be addressed, I'd still be using Finale. But it's not rational, in my opinion, to keep using something that is never going to be improved, has many issues (not for you, since you're apparently blessed, but I have had many problems rear their ugly heads when using Finale of late), and is now a bit less powerful than some of the alternatives. 

I get it; your world has been rocked and change is hard. Move on. Most of us have. 

In my case I came to Dorico after two changes - I used to use Finale from 2006-2012 and then moved to Sibelius 7 in 2012, just a few months before they let go of their team.

I originally moved from Finale because I was notating a particularly different score in Finale (modernist, with box notation, clusters, etc.) where bugs caused me to spend days longer on the score. I would be working on page 10 and while I was doing stuff on page 10 all day, page 5 would get completely messed up even though I never touched it. It was the most frustrating experience of my life and was the final straw that had me move to Sibelius for the next piece.

I was fairly happy on Sibelius - definitely much happier than on Finale. When Avid got rid of the Sibelius team, it was for financial reasons - other parts of Avid were losing money, and they saw that they had an expensive London UK office full of well paid people just developing Sibelius and laid them all off. For several years after this, nothing was happening with Sibelius. They started charging people for subscriptions and were still doing absolutely nothing. I refused to move to the subscription model because I didn't want to pay them yearly to not do anything. I moved to Dorico around 2018, at which point Sibelius had become so unstable on my computer that it was crashing every 5 minutes and I didn't want to be stuck moving to the new version. At this time, Dorico wasn't really quite ready for me to start using (it was missing a few features I needed) but it was stable but I didn't want to start paying Avid yearly just to get Sibelius not crashing again.

Moving from Finale to Sibelius was quite easy for me, I learned in a few weeks - I learned from the excellent documentation tutorial that came with Sibelius. Moving to Dorico was harder only because they didn't have the tutorials yet in 2018 (but do now in the form of the First Steps Guide). But my speed of getting a completed score went up with each change of program - going from Finale to Sibelius, I would get a completed, polished score done much more quickly with less time investment. Going up from Sibelius to Dorico, there was also a noticeable time improvement where I was able to get scores done to the same quality with less time investment due to the feature set. By this point I am very efficient in Dorico and am able to engrave the same score much faster than I ever could in Sibelius or Finale (each of which I had used for 6 years).

By this point I am very efficient in Dorico and am able to engrave the same score much faster than I ever could in Sibelius or Finale (each of which I had used for 6 years).

I'm finding much the same. I'm nearly done with a 40+-minute work that a) I perhaps would not have composed right now were it not for it being a good way to migrate to Dorico and learn more as I go (I started with reading the manual, literally, and viewing the videos) and b) probably was faster and more efficient to notate in Dorico than Finale, even with the learning curve.