8 ms·

Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]

107 points by JimWestergren 6y ago

jasode 6y ago
Well, the founders of Sibelius created another music notation software called Dorico[1]. Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism? Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS Excel copying Lotus 123 buggy leap year of 1900 to be more compatible.) EDIT -- just noticed same uploader also made a 1 hour video about Dorico[2] but not sure if answers my questions. [1] https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/ https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8
- Jgrubb 6y ago
  Never heard of dorico because this isn't my space, but that bit is mentioned in the video and it looks as if being greenfield with the original team has its advantages.
- dfan 6y ago
  Dorico is indeed better, and definitely not a copy of Sibelius UI-wise. Not only was the team starting over with a lot more experience under their belt, but they also had a much better idea of what didn't scale (from a user interface perspective) from the original Sibelius to its current incarnation, which has tons more features. It's worth pointing out that when Sibelius was first released, it was hugely nicer to use than the industry-leading product at the time (Finale).
  - uranusjr 6y ago
    It was also hugely nicer than the Sibelius now. In fact I’d even say Dorico is more like Sibelius (around version 3 or so, when the UI peaked IMO) than the current Sibelius.
  - philjohn 6y ago
    I used Finale at the time at home, but Sibelius at school. This was back when it was only on the Acorn ... compared to Finale it was an absolute joy to use.
NickHoff 6y ago
This guy also made a similarly acerbic video about MuseScore, a good open source scorewriter [1]. They actually took his criticisms and started making changes. The two ended up working together and I think he is now the design lead for MuseScore. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
- polyterative 6y ago
  great story
- aequitas 6y ago
  I almost binged his entire channel, there are a lot of good video's on there. Also there seem some deliberate choices in the background music and the way the video's flow, almost as if they are written as concert pieces themselves.
adrianh 6y ago
This video is only a few years old but should already be considered a classic. Not long after, the video's creator was hired to lead design of MuseScore (another sheet music desktop app). I find the world of music notation software to be fascinating in its diversity of design philosophies. Something about music notation — its complexity, plus its worldwide ubiquity, plus the business reality that there's (relatively) not a ton of money to be made in its software industry — creates a situation where many interesting ideas bloom and there is not one clear monopoly. Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work. My own attempt is with Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/ https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/), which has an entirely web-based sheet-music editor and lots of tools for music learning/practice.
- qmmmur 6y ago
  I would hedge that's the majority of the world doesn't learn or doesn't care for Western notation to be fair.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    And you'd be wrong. Western notation is used throughout the world, even more so than local notation systems. That's 100% true for classical, jazz, marching band, etc. musicians, but also for musicians in "pop" genres. Even folk/ethnic musicians around the world, with a few exceptions, are more common to use western notation than their historical notation (if available). If they gig and work with studios and orchestras, that's almost a certain.
    - anoonmoose 6y ago
      Or the two of you are just talking about different things. It is totally possible for "Western notation is used throughout the world" and "the majority of the world does not learn Western notation" to be true at the same time. What relevance their comment has is beyond me- perhaps making a point about the relatively niche market of "people who want to write music"- but who knows.
spuz 6y ago
This is an amazingly well done video. I love not only the on-point criticism of the UI but the demonstrations of the suggested improvements really drive the points home.
taffronaut 6y ago
It's ironic that several of the criticisms here are for huge lists of 'engraving' options in hidden menus in Sibelius. Engraving is the equivalent of typesetting (but music obviously doesn't have moveable type). I used a late 90's version of Finale for a long time which I think was originally written for engraving rather than composition. I had to learn to step over the engraving stuff in Finale to get to many of the composition features.
mazelife 6y ago
I've stubbornly stayed on Sibelius 6 for years, but it no longer works on OS X Catalina, so I was pondering biting the bullet and upgrading to 8. But after seeing this... Does anyone have any recommendations for a _real_ alternative they've used?* I took a look at MuseScore a couple of years ago and the impression I got was that it was fine for casual usage and for producing fairly simple scores, but lacked a lot of features. (I found that to be the case LillyPond as well.) Dorico looks more promising, but I'm curious what people who've used it heavily think. I didn't even know that Finale was still around, but that was the first notation software I learned. Ironic that the reason Sibelius was able to trounce Finale in the marketplace so many years ago was mainly because the UI was so much easier to use and more intuitive. And now it's succumbed to the same problems. *Features I'd like to see: parts generation, graphical score options, midi-based entry, and something that offers good default engraving behavior out-of-the-box but also lets you tweak everything to your liking. I typically sketch things out on on paper first, so I care less about "composition features" and more about being able to produce scores that are correct and that allow me to notate everything I would want.
- keehun 6y ago
  With exception to graphical score options, Dorico is by far the best out there now. Especially for orchestral/band scores where one stave normally has multiple parts (2 flutes, etc), Dorico can handle that natively now. Dorico has great out-of-the-box defaults and the people behind it genuinely care about great engraving. Perhaps Dorico has better graphical score engraving by now, but it didn't when it came out. I personally don't have much use for that, so I haven't followed.
- dfan 6y ago
  I used Sibelius for years and am happy to have switched to Dorico.
milesward 6y ago
Oh Sibelius is hot hot hell.
adamnemecek 6y ago
I've been working on an IDE for music composition and I like to think that I nailed the UI. Launching soon http://ngrid.io http://ngrid.io.
jancsika 6y ago
Have a look at what is actually needed for someone doing arbitrary copy/engraving jobs-- e.g., making money on the side by using software to engrave film scores, modern classical, musicals, etc. IIRC the most valuable feature is the ability for the engraver to quickly and deterministically escape the set of behaviors that the software provides to ease the act of engraving exactly what they want to see. Score and Finale have been the gold standards because there is a way to escape the default behavior, to draw whatever they want on the score. In Finale's case, these ways are all explicitly documented so that even a relatively new user can (slowly) find each escape valve. Finale even has a shitty, black-and-white Microsoft paint for the user to paint whatever articulation, shape, or even notehead they need to accommodate whatever notational style or concept is needed. That's all to say-- the power user is going to live in the escape valves for a substantial amount of time. (How else could you explain people still using Score when Finale had been around for decades?) Historically, competitors to Finale/Score simply did not have the adequate number of escape valves. In those cases good interface design was irrelevant because professional engravers couldn't get the control they needed to engrave scores, which meant they couldn't use those programs to make money. Either that, or the software would do a really good job at, say, jazz engraving, and then imply that it was good at all style of notation when it wasn't. Somebody at Musescore should do a kickstarter to cross-reference the current Finale documentation against the escape-valves present in Musescore. In the domain of engraving, is Musescore feature complete with all of Finale's escape valves? If so, it's worth advertising that because it's a really important achievement. (Note: I'm reticent to mention specific engraving problems for fear that a neophyte will take my 10 seconds of examples as a complete set and declare Musescore feature complete. But if someone wants examples and promises not to do that, I'll give them.) Edit: clarification
- mazelife 6y ago
  You managed to perfectly put into words something I was trying to articulate in my own comment on this thread about the limitations I kept running into with open source notation tools as alternatives to Sibelius. They always felt like they traded control for simplicity, which ultimately made them feel like kind of a "toy" rather than a professional tool. > I'm reticent to mention specific engraving problems for fear that a neophyte will take my 10 seconds of examples as a complete set I could not agree more. Correctly engraving music is hard! If someone wants to get a sense of all the things that a professional-grade tool would need to handle, Gardner Read's "Music Notation: A Manual of Modern Practice" is kind of the gold standard here. 453 pages that solely cover how to correctly notate music. I've been doing this for years and I still consult it fairly regularly.

107 points by JimWestergren 6y ago

Well, the founders of Sibelius created another music notation software called Dorico[1]. Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism? Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS Excel copying Lotus 123 buggy leap year of 1900 to be more compatible.) EDIT -- just noticed same uploader also made a 1 hour video about Dorico[2] but not sure if answers my questions. [1] https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/ https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8

Jgrubb 6y ago
Never heard of dorico because this isn't my space, but that bit is mentioned in the video and it looks as if being greenfield with the original team has its advantages.
dfan 6y ago
Dorico is indeed better, and definitely not a copy of Sibelius UI-wise. Not only was the team starting over with a lot more experience under their belt, but they also had a much better idea of what didn't scale (from a user interface perspective) from the original Sibelius to its current incarnation, which has tons more features. It's worth pointing out that when Sibelius was first released, it was hugely nicer to use than the industry-leading product at the time (Finale).
- uranusjr 6y ago
  It was also hugely nicer than the Sibelius now. In fact I’d even say Dorico is more like Sibelius (around version 3 or so, when the UI peaked IMO) than the current Sibelius.
- philjohn 6y ago
  I used Finale at the time at home, but Sibelius at school. This was back when it was only on the Acorn ... compared to Finale it was an absolute joy to use.

NickHoff 6y ago

This guy also made a similarly acerbic video about MuseScore, a good open source scorewriter [1]. They actually took his criticisms and started making changes. The two ended up working together and I think he is now the design lead for MuseScore. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A

polyterative 6y ago
great story
aequitas 6y ago
I almost binged his entire channel, there are a lot of good video's on there. Also there seem some deliberate choices in the background music and the way the video's flow, almost as if they are written as concert pieces themselves.

adrianh 6y ago

This video is only a few years old but should already be considered a classic. Not long after, the video's creator was hired to lead design of MuseScore (another sheet music desktop app). I find the world of music notation software to be fascinating in its diversity of design philosophies. Something about music notation — its complexity, plus its worldwide ubiquity, plus the business reality that there's (relatively) not a ton of money to be made in its software industry — creates a situation where many interesting ideas bloom and there is not one clear monopoly. Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work. My own attempt is with Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/ https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/), which has an entirely web-based sheet-music editor and lots of tools for music learning/practice.

qmmmur 6y ago
I would hedge that's the majority of the world doesn't learn or doesn't care for Western notation to be fair.
- coldtea 6y ago
  And you'd be wrong. Western notation is used throughout the world, even more so than local notation systems. That's 100% true for classical, jazz, marching band, etc. musicians, but also for musicians in "pop" genres. Even folk/ethnic musicians around the world, with a few exceptions, are more common to use western notation than their historical notation (if available). If they gig and work with studios and orchestras, that's almost a certain.
  - anoonmoose 6y ago
    Or the two of you are just talking about different things. It is totally possible for "Western notation is used throughout the world" and "the majority of the world does not learn Western notation" to be true at the same time. What relevance their comment has is beyond me- perhaps making a point about the relatively niche market of "people who want to write music"- but who knows.

spuz 6y ago

This is an amazingly well done video. I love not only the on-point criticism of the UI but the demonstrations of the suggested improvements really drive the points home.

taffronaut 6y ago

It's ironic that several of the criticisms here are for huge lists of 'engraving' options in hidden menus in Sibelius. Engraving is the equivalent of typesetting (but music obviously doesn't have moveable type). I used a late 90's version of Finale for a long time which I think was originally written for engraving rather than composition. I had to learn to step over the engraving stuff in Finale to get to many of the composition features.

mazelife 6y ago

I've stubbornly stayed on Sibelius 6 for years, but it no longer works on OS X Catalina, so I was pondering biting the bullet and upgrading to 8. But after seeing this... Does anyone have any recommendations for a _real_ alternative they've used?* I took a look at MuseScore a couple of years ago and the impression I got was that it was fine for casual usage and for producing fairly simple scores, but lacked a lot of features. (I found that to be the case LillyPond as well.) Dorico looks more promising, but I'm curious what people who've used it heavily think. I didn't even know that Finale was still around, but that was the first notation software I learned. Ironic that the reason Sibelius was able to trounce Finale in the marketplace so many years ago was mainly because the UI was so much easier to use and more intuitive. And now it's succumbed to the same problems. *Features I'd like to see: parts generation, graphical score options, midi-based entry, and something that offers good default engraving behavior out-of-the-box but also lets you tweak everything to your liking. I typically sketch things out on on paper first, so I care less about "composition features" and more about being able to produce scores that are correct and that allow me to notate everything I would want.

keehun 6y ago
With exception to graphical score options, Dorico is by far the best out there now. Especially for orchestral/band scores where one stave normally has multiple parts (2 flutes, etc), Dorico can handle that natively now. Dorico has great out-of-the-box defaults and the people behind it genuinely care about great engraving. Perhaps Dorico has better graphical score engraving by now, but it didn't when it came out. I personally don't have much use for that, so I haven't followed.
dfan 6y ago
I used Sibelius for years and am happy to have switched to Dorico.

milesward 6y ago

Oh Sibelius is hot hot hell.

adamnemecek 6y ago

I've been working on an IDE for music composition and I like to think that I nailed the UI. Launching soon http://ngrid.io http://ngrid.io.

jancsika 6y ago

Have a look at what is actually needed for someone doing arbitrary copy/engraving jobs-- e.g., making money on the side by using software to engrave film scores, modern classical, musicals, etc. IIRC the most valuable feature is the ability for the engraver to quickly and deterministically escape the set of behaviors that the software provides to ease the act of engraving exactly what they want to see. Score and Finale have been the gold standards because there is a way to escape the default behavior, to draw whatever they want on the score. In Finale's case, these ways are all explicitly documented so that even a relatively new user can (slowly) find each escape valve. Finale even has a shitty, black-and-white Microsoft paint for the user to paint whatever articulation, shape, or even notehead they need to accommodate whatever notational style or concept is needed. That's all to say-- the power user is going to live in the escape valves for a substantial amount of time. (How else could you explain people still using Score when Finale had been around for decades?) Historically, competitors to Finale/Score simply did not have the adequate number of escape valves. In those cases good interface design was irrelevant because professional engravers couldn't get the control they needed to engrave scores, which meant they couldn't use those programs to make money. Either that, or the software would do a really good job at, say, jazz engraving, and then imply that it was good at all style of notation when it wasn't. Somebody at Musescore should do a kickstarter to cross-reference the current Finale documentation against the escape-valves present in Musescore. In the domain of engraving, is Musescore feature complete with all of Finale's escape valves? If so, it's worth advertising that because it's a really important achievement. (Note: I'm reticent to mention specific engraving problems for fear that a neophyte will take my 10 seconds of examples as a complete set and declare Musescore feature complete. But if someone wants examples and promises not to do that, I'll give them.) Edit: clarification

mazelife 6y ago
You managed to perfectly put into words something I was trying to articulate in my own comment on this thread about the limitations I kept running into with open source notation tools as alternatives to Sibelius. They always felt like they traded control for simplicity, which ultimately made them feel like kind of a "toy" rather than a professional tool. > I'm reticent to mention specific engraving problems for fear that a neophyte will take my 10 seconds of examples as a complete set I could not agree more. Correctly engraving music is hard! If someone wants to get a sense of all the things that a professional-grade tool would need to handle, Gardner Read's "Music Notation: A Manual of Modern Practice" is kind of the gold standard here. 453 pages that solely cover how to correctly notate music. I've been doing this for years and I still consult it fairly regularly.