Dorico
Dorico is music notation and composition software for macOS that helps musicians write, engrave, edit, play back, and publish sheet music.
What is Dorico?
Dorico is a native desktop music notation app for macOS used to compose, arrange, engrave, and prepare printed music. It is designed for students, teachers, composers, arrangers, publishers, and performers who need to create professional-looking scores and parts with detailed control over notation and layout. Dorico supports note entry from a computer keyboard and MIDI devices, automatic part layout, playback with included sounds, and editing tools for articulation, dynamics, chord symbols, percussion, and larger ensemble writing. It also fits workflows that move between notation, rehearsal, and sharing by exporting formats such as PDF, MIDI, and MusicXML. On Mac, it is commonly used for concert music, film and media scoring, classroom assignments, lead sheets, and publishing-ready engraving. Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH publishes Dorico in multiple editions, including professional and entry-level variants built around the same notation platform.
Key features
- Create full scores and individual instrument parts with automatic layout updates.
- Enter notes using a computer keyboard, MIDI keyboard, or other supported input methods.
- Edit notation for chords, percussion, tuplets, articulations, dynamics, and complex rhythmic writing.
- Play back projects with built-in sounds and shape performances with MIDI editing tools.
- Export and share music as PDF, MIDI, MusicXML, and other common formats.
- Prepare readable sheet music for rehearsal, study, printing, and publication.
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Safety overview
Status: Safe
Dorico is legitimate notation software used to create and edit music projects. It normally needs access to your documents and removable drives only when you open, save, import, export, or print scores, and it may interact with MIDI devices, audio hardware, plug-ins, and Steinberg licensing components as part of normal use. Removing it will not harm macOS, but it can leave your scores, templates, playback settings, and related support files untouched unless you remove those separately.
Recommendation: Keep Dorico if you write, arrange, teach, study, or publish music on this Mac. If you no longer use it, you can remove the app to free space, but keep your project files and custom templates backed up first if you may need them later.
Common paths
/Applications/Dorico 5.app
Cache paths
~/Library/Caches/com.steinberg.dorico5
Support paths
~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 5
Preference paths
~/Library/Preferences/com.steinberg.dorico5.plist
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