DORICO upgrade from 3.5 to 5Pro - Get the Aspirins ready

I went for Dorico Pro 3 originally, interested in engraving quality, having looked at several other products, their licencing arrangements, prices, and ease of use including the instructions. Dorico offered several advantages, one of which was working without a time signature. 

I installed it on a USB eLicenser. 

As Steinberg is going over to its own licenser on a computer, eLicenser support ends at end 2024. The choices were simple: if you want to go over to the new Steinberg licence, upgrade to Pro5 at a cost of £132 in the UK. I have no need for the upgrade but if I want to go on using the product - that's it.

Okay. But doing this conversion was an outright headache. I kept getting error messages or claiming it can't proceed as other applications were using the eLicenser - which were rubbish. Dorico is my only product on it and it was not open. In frustration I kept clicking cancel on each popup. But then miraculously it started loading up Pro5.   It took around 1.5 hours to download everything and gave me a licence key.   So I was up and running.

But no. Yesterday I receive an email warning me Dorico would cease to work in 7 days if I don't verify it. (I mean, for Chrissakes it must have known I already had a version to be able to upgrade it and get working). The instructions were as clear as mud.   It seems that it needed to verify that I had a licence on the eLicenser before allowing me to proceed further. Thus far it had only given me a temporary licence. 

It took another 3 hours of faffing around, talking on the forum etc to find out what I was supposed to be doing. Just thank the Good Lord I didn't throw my eLicenser key away as I intended. It needed to see the original licence to do the verification.  Eventually I got it working and "verified".

I've honestly never encountered such an awkward, nightmarish installation.  Even on Windows 3.1 or 95 there'd been nothing like it. A list of instructions in structured English like a program specification is cried out for.  Thankfully, one of the chiefs on the Dorico forum explained what it was about and why. If only his words had prefaced the process I would have been miles more comprehensible. 

But it's done. The only advantage it offers me over 3.5 is that it no longer messes up tuplets when changing voices. For all that, it's probably still the best out there.