20 ms·
MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software
- ThouYS 6y ago"the first step in achieving this expanded focus", haha I know this one, the "expanded focus". I hope they can pull it off, MuseScore 3 is amazing!
- unicornfinder 6y agoI'm mostly just impressed by how many improvements they've made to their UI since hiring Tantacrul.
- panpanna 6y agoI feel they are on the wrong path. Musescore has significant UX issues and things have been getting worse with each release. Instead of adding new complex functions that are already done better by others they should try to fix the basic things first.
- thirteenfingers 6y agoWhat are some of the UX problems you're thinking of? Personally I've been pretty happy with it so far. (My main point of comparison is Sibelius, which I used until I went all-Linux three or four years ago.)
- panpanna 6y agoScoring directly in the software is a huge pain + buggy midi support often forces me to use a different software and then import the midi into musescore for printing.
- raverbashing 6y agoOh there are some. Some of them have been fixed in MS3 The one that's almost a show-stopper to me and I realized it only recently: if you insert notes (between existing notes), it won't move the existing notes to the right, but it will instead create this "long" bar with more notes than your time signature. Really
- epse 6y agoSend a tweet to Martin Keary / Tantacrul. He loves to hear about people's ux issues with musescore
- mirkules 6y agoThere are so many weird things like that, but the one that infuriates me the most is the inability to move notes left and right. The answer is to cut and paste, which - if you have already written out multiple bars but realize one note is in the wrong place or you’re a quarter note off - becomes an exercise in frustration. I recommended this software to someone, and my first words were: “This is a powerful program, but it has got a steep learning curve. It feels like it was designed and written by a programmer who also plays music” The answer from this person two weeks later: “You were totally right. Very frustrating.”
- moogly 6y agoI thought v3 was a big improvement on v2.
- ikeyany 6y agoHere I am still stuck with v2 on Linux Mint.
- boudewijnrempt 6y agoWhy not just download the appimage?
- stelonix 6y agoI'm still on 2 too, mostly because I recall being unable to use the plugin interface ionsome early version of 3, in late 2018; not sure if it was being reworkwd on or whatnot, but since I had been using MS to author some books and lessons for my students, I was already relying on the scripting, with no time to learn something new or wait for the APIs to work again. Since I'm stuck in this version limbo, I use a library I wrote in Python to manipulate mscx files. I think thos is also a mini-rant on how little FOSS software seems to care about backwards conpatibility. Still, v2 still is much better than any other notation software I tried so I'm not switching.
- hexmiles 6y agothey actually hired the person behind this video (tantacrul): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A It criticize the user interface and experience of various music application. I find it very entertaining yet still informative
- dry_soup 6y agoExciting news! This feels like a Blender 2.8-style project. What's funny about this is that a composer/music YouTuber/UX designer called Tantacrul meticulously roasted MuseScore's UI on YouTube, and the MuseScore team ended up hiring him, leading to this project. The video in question: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
- gitgud 6y agoHis series of videos on composer software is a pretty entertaining look at confusing GUI choices. I wish there was more critical videos of popular software's GUIs.
- afterwalk 6y agoThis UX review video is awesome and hilarious, and also illustrate the competitive advantage of combining general design expertise with specific domain experience.
- scottious 6y agoI've long been impressed with the progress that MuseScore is making and this seems like a huge jump forward. > Under the design direction of Martin Keary, we are making significant improvements to the interaction models and interface of MuseScore 4 For those interested, Martin Keary (aka Tantacrul on YouTube) creates these very impressive YouTube videos of reviews of music notation software. His reviews are usually very scathing, but an honest critique. After his video reviewing MuseScore, the MuseScore team spent a lot of time addressing the issues he pointed out and eventually hired him!
- n3k5 6y ago> For those interested, Martin Keary (aka Tantacrul on YouTube) creates these very impressive YouTube videos of reviews of music notation software. They're also quite entertaining. Worth a watch even if you have just a passing interest in UI/UX design and no clue about music engraving. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm9VVia9DFSUVK24lR9mS5zT0sasxctad https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm9VVia9DFSUVK24lR9mS... (This playlist contains some other stuff as well, but the interface design ones are clearly labeled in the titles.)
- mirkules 6y agoI just watched the MuseScore video. I get that he’s trying to be entertaining, but he just comes off as a jerk to me. Doesn’t make him less correct of course, but do we really need a blood-vomiting Shostakovich or imagined email exchange making fun of “New All” (among other examples)? Honestly, it’s disappointing that this is the default way to criticize someone’s work, however bad it may be. Imagine if your users, teachers or even parents critiqued your work in this way.
- adamnemecek 6y agoI've been working on an IDE for music composition http://ngrid.io http://ngrid.io. I'll release it soon.
- sk0g 6y agoAny hints as to what to expect? Signed up, but the tease is always fun :)
- abjecton 6y agoExciting times. I appreciate the team's work on creating such high quality software. It doesn't feel like some random open source software. But it's always a work in progress, at the same time.
- bayindirh 6y agoEvery application is a work in progress. They either improve continuously or in point releases, step by step. We were using musescore for our sheet music while I was playing in a symphony orchestra and, it was very capable back then. It was missing some very niche things (like Turkish Music Coma notation which divides a note to 9!) but, it was vastly usable. I'm glad they didn't stop and moving forward. It's a very nice piece of software.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bambax 6y agoAs an occasional user of MuseScore (which I like a lot), I'd be weary of them going down the DAW path. They really should focus on music notation. There are already more DAWs than needed, some free, some inexpensive, and most of them pretty good. It's unlikely a MuseScore DAW will bring anything new to the scene, whereas on the music notation front they occupy a unique and very strong position (their competitors being either outrageously expensive or not good). My two cents.
- truckerbill 6y agoA DAW that focuses on notation rather than piano-roll doesn’t really exist in the market however. The UX of the apps that support a stave is stuck in the 90s.
- p_l 6y agoHow does OpusModus compare? I'm less than amateur when it comes to music and found it from completely different direction, so I would like to know opinions.
- truckerbill 6y agoIt looks really cool but it seems like more of musical scripting/markup language than a DAW. Most musicians won’t be touching that.
- Kye 6y agoReaper has had a notation view for a while.
- erwincoumans 6y agoLogic Pro X has a music notation view called Score Editor.
- Kye 6y agoOne plus of Reaper is it runs on the same platforms as MuseScore. Everything I've heard about Logic Pro is great, and I would like to try it, but it's Mac-only.
- ttflee 6y ago> We have moved to the new code style. Finally.
- lamby 6y agoThis actually represents a major and fundamental philosophical shift in the sense that it takes Musescore from being a tool of representation to a tool of creation. I may be overinterpreting this of course, but I am reading a lot into how this might be following (or bucking) a general trend in internet/tech/wider culture that could be characterised as favouring mediums and platforms of consumption over ones of curation… yet alone creation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- save_ferris 6y agoI’ve lost a lot of faith in MuseScore over the last couple of years. Their UX still has some major warts over Finale that haven’t improved, and they completely screwed over their users by encouraging them to upload their compositions to MuseScore’s cloud library and then cutting off free access to the cloud library. They ginned up as much content as they could from users and then announced this huge change in access a few months later. I’ve lost a lot of faith in this business model because early users get screwed the hardest and as time goes by, it’s harder and harder to justify using this app. Why is it that these projects so often promise the world early on only to continuously chip away at their own promises and undermine the faith of the community that gave them business to begin with?
- michaelcampbell 6y agoThe cddb model! Truly enraging.
- nchelluri 6y agoThat does sound awful. Did they allow a grace period for people to download/migrate their stuff off the platform?
- triclops200 6y agoThey did. OP also neglected to mention that this was forced by the music industry threatening to sue them into oblivion if they didn't put it behind a pay wall.
- jedimastert 6y agoCan you expand on this, or point to an article? I don't follow Musescore but I do follow music copyright stuff (which I assume this was about.
- triclops200 6y agoYeah. Lots of things that were uploaded to this cloud service were transcriptions or complete rips of sheet music of in-copyright works. Sheet music is also copyrighted and when the music industry found out about the service, it got strong armed.
- severak_cz 6y agoSounds very promising for me as a man who cannot read musical notation at all. :-) I am looking for some software which will do something like MIDI -> notation transformation. PS: Sibelius crashed!
- mkl 6y agoIf you already play an instrument or sing, learning the fundamentals of music notation will take less than an hour, and practice makes it fluid. Following scores along to music or repeatedly puzzling out how to play pieces from the notation is what makes it automatic, and happens over time, just like any other skill. You start kind of laboriously with counting lines to see what note it is, and quickly become able to recognise notes directly. Most notation programs can import MIDI, including MuseScore.
- alphabetter 6y agoThe thing the most frustrates me about Musescore is the core dev-teams irrational refusal to add scroll-bars to the score panel (even as an option). Requests in the past have always been met with a “you are doing it wrong” response https://musescore.org/en/node/268908 https://musescore.org/en/node/268908 Has new input on the design changed this approach?
- TomMasz 6y agoI've used MuseScore on and off, mostly because it's UI frustrates me and gets in the way. It's powerful, but it needs a way to make simple notation easy. If they're truly going to make it better for casual users, I'm all for it.
- TeaDude 6y agoHoly moly! As a big user of midi (I'm trying to make music for embedded platforms) the sequencer is a KILLER feature. I've used LMMS in the past as I still find it much easier to compose with a sequencer than an actual music sheet but the major flaw is it's midi export not exporting the instruments meaning I have to touch it up in Aria Maestosa. Ps. The musescore soundfont is probably the highest quality open source one out there, not a single instrument sounds wrong. It's my goto soundfont for composing
- jcpst 6y agoFor those that are not afraid of using a DSL to generate scores, Lilypond is great. Much like using graphviz to generate workflows, you can just hop in an editor and start typing out your score, creating reusable chunks along the way. There is also a decent live-reload style editor called Frescobaldi.
- Sander_Marechal 6y agoDo you mean lilypond instead of lilypad? As a developer I love lilypond because I can write sheet music using my regular development workflow.
- zozbot234 6y agoI assume you mean Lilypond. It's great, but the interop with MusicXML format (the closest thing to a standard when it comes to machine-readable sheet music - and also supported by MuseScore) could use some improvement.
- jcpst 6y agoYes, thank you both for the correction.
- TuringNYC 6y agoI just checked out the product site, this seems extensive and impressive. How do you make money?
- pier25 6y agoI find this move a bit weird to be honest. It seems like they are targeting the wrong users. People interested in writing sheet music usually do not need a DAW. And if they do, they probably already have one. Also, instead of focusing on polishing their product core (writing sheet music) they are diluting their efforts.
- robbrown451 6y agoThey are probably seeing the writing on the wall.... people who use computers to compose music (which is probably 90% of musicians under 40) don't tend to use sheet music except as an output format, and even that is declining along with the need for real musicians playing instruments. Pianoroll notation and all the things that tend to come with that just lend themselves to computers. In many ways this is like CAD transitioning away from fractional notation to decimal. Fractions suck when using anything measured or derived, as they give you a tradeoff between accuracy and readability, that isn't the case with decimals. (i.e. is 19/64 bigger or smaller than 9/32? Meanwhile it's quite obvious that .296 is bigger than .281) With fractions, and traditional music notation, quantization is an important and annoying part of the process.
- jancsika 6y agoDoes MuseScore have feature parity with Finale wrt notation? Essentially: Speedy Entry or its equivalent (keypad-entry ftw) An escape hatch for the user to paint their way out of all western notational edge cases (splayed stems, chord clusters, crazy slurs, etc.) If it doesn't have the first then you lose all the copyists (gotta go fast). If you don't have the second then you don't get the contractors engraving Henle editions (because control over the score isn't fine-grained enough). Edit: I initially wrote "reliable escape hatch" but removed reliable-- at least when I was using it, many of Finale's workaround tools were buggy. Stuff like dragging a shape and the shape drifts away from the pointer the further you drag it from the origin. But you could power through the bugs and eventually get exactly what you want and print it out.
- TylerE 6y agoJust use Dorico and have support for all of that stuff in actual notation... https://steinberg.help/dorico/v2/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_stems_altered_unisons_split_stems_c.html https://steinberg.help/dorico/v2/en/dorico/topics/notation_r... https://steinberg.help/dorico_pro/v3/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_slurs_segments_c.html?hl=slur https://steinberg.help/dorico_pro/v3/en/dorico/topics/notati...
- jancsika 6y agoWhat about the escape hatch for things not listed there? For example, I didn't see clusters, or [one of probably 20 other things I could list one of which almost certainly requires an escape hatch]
- TylerE 6y agoClusters are easily created as a custom notehead. This gives you full control over exact design and placement. As for the rest, well, without knowing what your items are, I can't really respond - but Dorico is AMAZINGLY capable. Irrational time signatures? Any crazy/arbitrary/arbitrarily nested tuplets you care to dream up? True open/unmearsured time signatures? Arbitrary microtonal systems? Multiple simultaneous time signatures? All out of the box. But of course it supports the ultimate escape hatch... you can import SVG or export the entire score as SVG.
- tunesmith 6y agoOpen source music notation is a thankless job - notation is hard, and when you're composing, you run into corner cases pretty quickly. I'm personally a big fan of lilypond because I'm also a programmer (and I also like LaTeX, which has a similar model), and I love that with lilypond I get both superior output, and source files that I can track with git, which is great when I have different versions of some of my works - I can actually compile them. Here's a sample of a simple full-orchestra film cue I notated with lilypond which made me appreciate how easy it was to override default behavior: https://github.com/tunesmith/TheForgivingSea/blob/master/1M2/pdf/1M2.pdf https://github.com/tunesmith/TheForgivingSea/blob/master/1M2... Browsing the git repo above shows how scores and parts can be structured - from the same codebase, that repo can generate the parts for the individual orchestral instruments, similar to how many other notation packages can, except with lilypond I have total control. And it's the only notation solution I've tried that makes me comfortable that I'll have decades of compatibility - I can't even open most of my old Finale/Sibelius scores from college since I stopped paying for upgrades. Many composers also believe that Lilypond has the best engraving quality of all notation software. But lilypond's been stuck on MusicXML support for years, and with pretty poor sound output options. On the other hand, sound output isn't a major priority for me, I usually use a sequencer or a piano to sketch out ideas, and I think there's something of an impedance mismatch between notation and sequencing anyway. For MuseScore to go in this direction implies that they must be thinking they're already nailing the notation side. I'll try it out at some point to see if the UI ease-of-use makes up for the other things it loses - maybe I can use it for lead sheets - but I kind of doubt they're moving in a direction to be able to support serious composers.
- necrotic_comp 6y ago> For MuseScore to go in this direction implies that they must be thinking they're already nailing the notation side. They're not. There's still a lot of work to do. It's passable, but it's not 100% yet. When you're scoring with Lilypond, what front end do you use ? And does that frontend have midi in / out ? I don't really care what the internal sounds are, but when I'm scoring/writing I like to be at my piano, and being able to play back chord voicings/rhythms is helpful.
- fenwick67 6y agoOh man, I could have really used the sequencer when I took my music composition classes in college. Finale and Sibelius are not conducive to actually writing music.
- prvc 6y agoWant to add that they really need to revamp their note entry process, which is very unpleasant and inefficient, and necessarily involves a lot of backtracking and redundancy. I hope this is included in the next version.