The reckoning begins.

I have on my kanban board a sticky note to write about my realization that now that I have exported all my Finale music files to .musicxml files, there is actually no hurry to reconfigure them in whichever of the two programs I choose to continue composing in. (Those two programs are Dorico and MuseScore.)

I scribbled “Love to fly” because I forgot that the actual title is “I am alone.”

However, that’s over in my “blogging topics” column; over in my DOING column, I have one that says TEST DORICO, and an attached one with the titles of two pieces: “I am alone,” from Dream One of Seven Dreams of Falling, and “The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives,” from William Blake’s Inn. Both of these pieces are fairly large works, especially “I am alone,” and “Marmalade Man” has a lot of percussion noise, which Finale was notorious for being unable to keep track of from one version to the next.

My goal is to see how well either of the programs do in a simple import situation, i.e., just open up the .musicxml files straight into the program and without bothering to learn how the program actually works, hit play.

Notation-speaking-wise, both programs seemed to be fine, although I’d have to do a closer examination of each (and actually learn how to use both to see how easy they are to fix import problems in).

Sound-speaking-wise… Well.

If you’d like to follow along, here’s the score (pdf). My advice is to listen to the Finale version all the way through, and then start the other two around the 2:30 mark.

Here’s what good old Finale thought “I am alone” sounds like:

Here’s Dorico’s version:

Here’s MuseScore:

Right off the bat, Dorico is not quite right. It doesn’t seem to be playing the tenor’s part, and especially in the more grandiose portions it just misses the mark.

MuseScore does better, but still a bit off.

I recognize with both I would need to get in under the hood and make adjustments to the instrumentation, which means going deeper than I want to or have time for at the moment, so add that to the list of frustrations in this whole process.

Next up, we’ll assay “The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives.”