I installed Dorico 5.1 two weeks ago, and it it is relatively stable.
A few features that may be useful for our Scorewriters ands Orchestrators who use Dorico as their DAW:
- Introduction of instrument editable families. You can easily define instrument orders.
- Addition of Iconica Elements sound libraries. (They sound indeed better than the awful Halion libraries, but they will not replace full professional libraries, I'm afraid.)
- Collision handling can now be manually finetuned.
- Divisi have been reworked. I do hope that will solve issues we had in complex string scores.
- Instrument changes can now better be announced with improved paragraph styles.
- Fermata can now be played back.
- Quite some changes have been introduced to improve humanisation, and facilitated audio rendering. You can easily add hidden playing techniques.
- There is now, finally, a Undo History.
- You can now drag complete slurs easily in all directions.
- You can finally drag notes vertically to change their pitch.
- You can now use mark down notation in fields that are text only, in order to introduce bold and italic notation.
- You can export the text from your project. Interesting to proofread the lyrics of an aria.
- There are now interesting statistics for a project. It will be helpful for all of us to determine the amount of work you contributed to a work. I will make a separate post about this.
- A command to search for players who do not have any music, and to remove them. Very useful when importing notes in MIDI format, or from other programs in XML.
- The workflow has been improved in several areas.
- Import and export of XML has been improved.
A good overview is on the Dorico Forum.
I had some crashes (on my Windows system) after importing work from 5.0 or 4.x, but I could recover it afterwards. I did not yet experiment much on my Mac.
I recommend switching to 5.1.
