New features

A new Colors page has been added to Preferences. It includes new options that allow you to control colors used for various purposes in the music area, including the first eight voices on each staff, and to invert music/page colors, which by default shows white music on a black background. See Changing music area colors and Inverting colors.

You can now specify the flows that you want to print or export. Dorico Pro then prints/exports all pages on which the selected flows appear. See Print Flows dialog.

You can now activate properties in the Properties panel by clicking their name in addition to their activation switch. See Properties panel.

You can now export all visual items and options in the current project as a .doricolib file. You can then import the .doricolib file into other projects and share it with other users. See Exporting libraries.

Lyrics now use paragraph styles instead of font styles. This allows you to format lyrics in more detail, including adjusting their font stretch. See Lyrics paragraph styles.

You can override the paragraph style used for individual lyrics. For example, if you want to use a paragraph style with less stretch for lyrics on tightly spaced systems. See Changing the paragraph style used for lyrics.

You can now edit the formatting of individual lyrics, such as making single characters underlined. See Edit Lyric dialog.

The new jump bar allows you to perform commands and go to locations using only your computer keyboard. See Jump bar.

You can assign jump bar aliases to specific commands; for example, so you can use shorter entries for your favorite commands. See Assigning jump bar aliases.

You can now save existing projects as custom project templates, allowing you to create future projects containing the same players, page templates, and default settings. See Saving custom project templates.

The handling of imported/opened MIDI files has been extensively improved. You can now map tracks to specific players and playing techniques, and save your settings for reuse in subsequent imports. See MIDI Import Options dialog.

During MIDI recording, Dorico Pro now automatically transcribes multiple simultaneous parts into separate voices, such as in contrapuntal piano music. Depending on your settings for MIDI recording and quantization, Dorico Pro can also detect slurs, tremolos, trills, pedal lines, tuplets, and grace notes. See MIDI recording.

By default, players are now automatically sorted in orchestral order, regardless of the order in which you add them to the project. You can change the player sorting setting in the Players panel in Setup mode. See Players panel.

You can now designate players as soloists, such as in a concerto for solo violin and orchestra. Soloists are treated differently, such as their instruments not being numbered with other instruments of the same type and being automatically positioned in the conventional score position, that is, above the strings. See Designating players as soloists.

You can now define capos for individual fretted instruments. You can then control how capos affect notated pitches and chord symbols/diagrams independently of each other to suit a range of requirements. See Capos.

The lower zone, formerly known as the “bottom panel”, now contains multiple different panels, including Keyboard, Fretboard, and Drum Pads panels that you can use to input notes and the Mixer and Key Editor panels that you can use to adjust playback. See Lower zone (Write mode).

Instrument filters allow you to show only the staves of selected instruments in galley view. You can easily switch between showing only staves in the filter and all staves in the layout. See Instrument filters.

Insert mode has been given additional functionality, allowing you to change the scope of its impact. For example, you can now set Insert mode to affect all players in flows and also change the duration of the current bar. See Insert mode scopes.

You can also now set a stop position in each flow, which prevents any material beyond the stop point being affected by inserted notes. See Setting Insert mode stop positions.

Dorico Pro now provides multiple tools for transforming pitches and rhythms, including reversing and inverting pitches. See Musical transformations.

The functionality of the note tools popover has been expanded to include the new musical transformations. You can also transform notes using new, dedicated dialogs. See Note tools popover.

Play mode has had a complete refresh in both appearance and functionality. Tracks now appear in a track overview, with editing options available in the Track Inspector and Key Editor. See Project window in Play mode.

Dialogs for visual items and options in the library are now accessible on a new Library menu. This also allows you to access these dialogs from all modes. See Library.

There is a new Library Manager that gives you an overview of all visual items and options in the current project and allows you to compare these against another project, your user library, or Dorico’s factory library. The Library Manager makes it easy to import options from any of these locations into the current project, from all options down to a granular per-option level if required. See Library Manager.

Numbered bar regions allow you to show bar counts in specific regions without additional notations. This can help performers keep track of how many bars have passed when playing repetitive music. See Numbered bar regions.

Changing the application language now takes effect immediately, without the need to restart Dorico Pro. See Changing the application language.

You can now automatically reset all existing instrument names and customize the appearance of accidentals and note names when changing the language for instrument names. See Changing the language for instrument names.

You can now change the language used for date and time tokens. See Changing the language for date and time tokens.

The Hub has been redesigned, and now includes a Create New page where you can set up basic project information, including adding the project title, selecting a time signature, and specifying a starting number of bars. See Hub.

When adding ensembles, you can now build custom ensembles and save them for future projects. The ensemble picker has also been given a default key command. See Ensemble picker and Building and saving custom ensembles.

You can now duplicate existing layouts, which copies everything in the original, including page template and staff spacing overrides. See Duplicating layouts.

Some functions in the Notes toolbox now have additional options available when you click and hold their button, including allowing you to open the tuplets popover. See Notes toolbox.

You can now switch between accessing panels and popovers from the Notations toolbox in Write mode. See Notations toolbox.

A new automatic note respelling dialog has been added, allowing you to specify the notes you want to respell and apply general preferences to the selection. See Respell Notes Automatically dialog.

You can now copy note spellings to other layouts, for example, if you originally respelled notes in a part layout but want those spellings to appear in the full score layout as well. See Copying note spellings to other layouts.

Additionally, you can reset changes to note spellings in either the current layout only or in all layouts. See Resetting note spellings.

You can now calculate and create chord symbols based on the harmony of selected notes. See Calculating chord symbols based on existing music.

You can change the arrangement of polychord and altered bass note chord symbols. See Changing the arrangement of compound chord symbols.

You can also now erase the background of chord symbols. See Erasing the background of chord symbols.

You can now show parentheses around chord symbols, including showing only a single left or right bracket on individual parenthesized chord symbols. See Parenthesized chord symbols.

For players set to show chord diagrams, you can now show only the chord symbol or chord diagram for individual chord symbols. See Showing only chord symbols or chord diagrams.

The new Insert Music Symbol dialog makes it easier to add music symbols, such as note glyphs and accidentals, to text items and in text frames. See Insert Music Symbol dialog.

You can now input tasto solo indications and bracketed figures, including only showing a single bracket on each figure. See Figured bass popover and Showing single brackets on figured bass. See also Changing the figured bass bracket style.

There are new options to make casting off layouts easier, including moving bars to next/previous systems and locking/resetting entire layouts. See Moving bars to other systems, Locking layouts, and Resetting casting off.

Additionally, there is now a preference for whether system/frame breaks are allowed within bars. Disallowing breaks within bars lets you select anything in the bar at the start of which you want a system/frame break. See Allowing/Disallowing breaks within bars.

You can now copy phrases and paste only their articulations and jazz articulations to other phrases. See Copying and pasting articulations.

You can now show fingerings in chord diagrams, either inside dots or at the ends of strings. You can change individual fingerings when editing chord diagram shapes. See Hiding/Showing fingerings in chord diagrams and Edit Chord Diagram dialog.

There are now separate font styles for fingerings and starting fret numbers in chord diagrams. See Chord diagram font styles.

You can now interact with rests belonging to unpitched percussion instruments, including moving rests vertically and deleting rests. See Moving rests vertically and Deleting rests.

You can now show player names instead of instrument names for each player in each layout independently, and set both full and short player names for each player. For example, in works with multiple percussionists, showing “Percussion 1” in staff labels regardless of their current instrument is sometimes preferred. See Showing instrument/player names in staff labels and Renaming players.

Additional options have been added for the appearance and position of instrument transpositions in staff labels, including parenthesizing instrument transpositions and showing them after the instrument number. See Changing the appearance/position of instrument transpositions in staff labels.

You can now both group the instrument names of adjacent section players in staff labels, and align grouped instrument names with the first staff rather than centered between staves. See Grouping the staff labels of adjacent identical instruments.

You can now show vertical labels for player groups to the left of staff labels, as is sometimes used in large-scale works. See Player group labels.

A Reset to Factory option has been added to the Preferences dialog, allowing you to restore the factory defaults for application preferences if necessary. See Preferences dialog.

All four ways of saving, resetting, and removing defaults in options dialogs are now always shown. Previously, it was necessary to hold a modifier key to access other options if you had existing saved defaults. See Layout Options dialog, Note Input Options dialog, Notation Options dialog, Engraving Options dialog, and Playback Options dialog.

When you save projects, Dorico now generates preview images of the layout open in the music area. PNG files are used on the Open Recent page in the Hub. See Project Info dialog.

You can now add retakes and pedal level changes to, and remove them from, multiple rhythmic positions simultaneously. See Adding retakes and pedal level changes with the popover, Adding retakes and pedal level changes with the panel, and Removing retakes and pedal level changes.

You can now change the voice of existing notes using the same methods as creating and switching between voices during note input. See Changing the voice of existing notes.

The templates for achieving consistent page formatting that used to be known as “master pages” have been renamed, and are now known as “page templates” throughout Dorico. See Page templates.

You can now show crosshairs when selecting and/or dragging items in Engrave mode, which can help you align items more easily. See Hiding/Showing crosshairs.

The Edit Font Styles and Paragraph Styles dialogs now show a preview of the selected font/paragraph style. See Edit Font Styles dialog and Paragraph Styles dialog.

You can now change the size of accidentals independently of noteheads. See Changing the size of accidentals.

You can now set minimum gaps between bar numbers and different clefs shown at the start of systems. See Project-wide engraving options for bar numbers.

You can now hide numbers in subordinate bar number sequences and only show alphabetical letters, such as “a”, “b”, and “c”. See Adding subordinate bar numbers.

You can now change the gaps between, and thickness of, beam lines for individual beams. See Changing the gaps between beam lines and Changing the thickness of beams.

You can now force centered beams for beams that include notes only on one side of the middle staff line using the new Custom Centered Beam dialog. See Creating centered beams.

You can now hide/show clefs and key signatures at the start of single-staff systems from the second system onwards in each flow independently. This is a convention commonly used in hand-copied lead sheets. See Hiding/Showing clefs at the start of systems and Hiding/Showing key signatures at the start of systems.

You can now turn existing notes into grace notes and vice versa. See Turning existing notes into grace notes and Turning grace notes into normal notes.