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MuseScore is trash. You can't even reorder notes or rests by dragging them (and you'll get attacked if you ask about this in the forum): https://www.youtube.com

MuseScore is trash. You can't even reorder notes or rests by dragging them (and you'll get attacked if you ask about this in the forum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJdKP5SvAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJdKP5SvAc We're talking about simply swapping the order of notes or rests in a measure, which doesn't change the number of beats or otherwise invalidate it. Keep downvoting, apologists.

reikonomusha 3y ago
I don't know if an extraordinarily complex GUI program that services a hundred different kinds of users lacking a single feature is enough to classify it as garbage. What alternative open-source, well-maintained, GUI-based engraving software would you recommend?
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  This is basic editing functionality, a core part of the purpose of the application. You can call being able to edit a score "a feature," but it's hard to imagine what is more fundamental to it.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    What alternative open-source, well-maintained, GUI-based engraving software that features this "basic editing functionality" would you recommend?
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      I would argue that this constitutes not well-maintained. It's not like the feature is being requested in an mp3 player, it's a music score editor that refuses to allow editing a music score. Even if there is no other better, so what? It doesn't make it valueless garbage either necessarily, and so I agree with the downvotes on the original comment. But this point by itself seems perfectly valid to me. "Well-maintained" definitely takes a ding to it's polish at the very least.
      - reikonomusha 3y ago
        The score can be edited just fine, though not in the way you're used to or prefer. It doesn't make your request or others' invalid, but it's simply wrong and preposterous to suggest that MuseScore doesn't allow scores to be edited.
        Brian_K_White 3y ago
        Not me. I'm a bystander.
        kazinator 3y ago
        An executable file in /usr/bin can be edited just fine, just not in the way you'd prefer. So much so that certain licenses can legally prevent you from redistributing that binary without source. How easy something is to edit matters --- so much so that legality can hinge on it.
  - ksenzee 3y ago
    I’ve been using it for many years now and I’ve never found myself wanting to reorder notes by dragging them around. The difficulty (among others) is that dragging is reserved for small visual adjustments. If it were also capable of moving notes from one beat to another, people would find themselves trying to make a visual adjustment and suddenly moving their note to the next beat over. It doesn’t make any sense. Use note input mode instead of the mouse and you’ll have an easier time.
    - kazinator 3y ago
      > I’ve never found myself wanting to reorder notes by dragging them around I cannot imagine using a program like MuseScore for anything other than composing original music, whose content is not known at the outset. Pretty much everyone who defends the MuseScore UI turns out to be more of a music typist. (And, sure, that is an entirely legitimate, necessary activity in professional music.) "Oh, give it a few weeks of learning, and you too will be transcribing existing music (for your whole orchestra even!) in a clean left-to-right pass whereby you don't have to go back and do anything more complicated than adjusting a wrong note pitch."
      - ksenzee 3y ago
        I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, but I have been composing original music—not transcribing or “typing”—for many years in MuseScore. I do not use the mouse for note entry. I cannot imagine wanting to use the mouse for note entry. The computer keyboard in note entry mode is so much faster than clicking around with a mouse.
        kazinator 3y ago
        Do you have any videos of you composing, or else someone else doing same using a very similar workflow? There must be some reason you are unimpeded, such as having excellent grasp of music notation? Like if you hear a syncopated rhythm in your head, or tap it out, do you know the exact rest values you need to insert to achieve it? If I'm doing it, I need to be able to take a stab at it, play it back, and easily adjust it as needed, like add another sixteenth rest here, and delete one there.
- kazinator 3y ago
  As an alternative to MuseScore, I'd recommend moving to a monastery, where you write music by candlelight with a quill and inkwell, while wearing a hair shirt.
highmastdon 3y ago
This and a feature to “insert” note lengths instead of “overwriting” them, is imo a fundamental piece of missing feature. I have the same experience with posting a request for help in this direction. They’re very pedantic when it comes to how a person uses the software. (The use case I need this for us when I want to transcribe music by ear. I first use my MIDI device to type all the notes, and subsequently modify the lengths. Currently I have to cut, modify length, paste, repeat. For every, single, note, rest… Extremely annoying) If anyone knows software that can help me with this, or another way to transcribe music wrt my use case, let me know!
- reikonomusha 3y ago
  As far as open-source software is concerned, you can use Lilypond [1]. Fully text-based transcription. You can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. to your heart's content in your favorite text editor and get a high-quality engraving as output. [1] https://lilypond.org/ https://lilypond.org/
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    As much as lilypond is awesome, it really is NOT the same sort of tool as musescore. Lilypond's purpose is to create "beautiful engraved (printed) scores". Musescore is as much a compositional tool as anything else, although the (now-former) project lead does value the printed output too, and believes that Musescore is now better than lilypond in several ways.
    - kazinator 3y ago
      LilyPond is much, much better suited toward writing music that doesn't exist yet and is changing as you invent it. Because, as reikonomusha put it in the previous comment, "you can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. to your heart's content in your favorite text editor", which makes the overwhelming difference. You don't see the notation as you're entering it, but you have a way to iterate on that. However, it greatly helps if you're a developer or computer scientist, since you're working with a compiled markup language. LilyPond isn't the answer for regular mortals. LilyPond has sane playback. If the piece you've written is 3 bars long so far, and you play the MIDI file that pops out of the compile, you hear 3 bars and then it terminates. MuseScore requires you to specify the number of bars before you compose and then gives you sheet full of that many empty bars. When you click play, it plays through all the notes you have composed so far ... and then doesn't stop! It goes through the empty bars. It's like the Forrest Gump of music programs. Run, MuseScore, run! If you put a double bar in its path, it doesn't get fooled: that's not the actual end of the file, so it blows right through it.
asddubs 3y ago
Interesting, I don't know anything about music notation, why do they say this isn't/shouldn't be a feature on the forums?
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  I haven't found a clear explanation. Forum trolls simply pounce on those who ask, pretending that this is a crazy suggestion that can't be accomplished by a computer. Example of the FUD: "dragging is the most dangerous way to move anything. If you have notes in the wrong place, simply re-enter them in the correct place and delete anything left over." When asked why it was "dangerous," there was no reply. These people rabidly defend a mode of operation that requires you to continually delete your work and re-do it. Apologists lash out at anyone who insinuates that MuseScore's functionality falls short of miraculous. I mean... you can see it in a comment above.
  - reikonomusha 3y ago
    As is the case with a lot of open source software: The people who volunteer their time to help build it get to prioritize what they please. The people building it don't feel your pain in being unable to drag notes around the score, and so they don't want to spend their nights and weekends building a complex feature* that they don't need. The beauty of open source software is that if you find a cohort of software engineers interested in making this feature happen, you can make it happen. But that's hard to get people to build stuff for free, isn't it? * The feature is complex. Notes most likely have data and constraints attached to them (e.g., a crescendo might terminate on a note). What happens if you drag a tied note? What if you drag a note from one measure to another? Can you drag between voices? This is a huge feature if you want to make it actually work for practical scores.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      Certainly if you have inter-note dependencies (or other multi-note expressions) things get complicated. But dragging notes or other elements can be disallowed where those dependencies exist. All I wanted to do was swap the position of a quarter note and a quarter rest, and couldn't do it. That's absurd.
bilboa 3y ago
I downvoted your comment, not because I'm a MuseScore apologist, but just because calling an extraordinarily complex piece of software like this "trash" just because it's missing an obviously-useful-but-non-critical feature, seems extremely hyperbolic.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  I consider the feature critical. Why on earth present a GUI and then tell people not to use it as a GUI? What is the purpose of letting you grab and drag things on the staff then, if this is a huge no-no? And how is this "hyperbolic?" A quick search will show you that this is a question that is asked numerous times about MuseScore. Examples: https://musescore.org/en/node/321194 https://musescore.org/en/node/321194 https://musescore.org/en/node/333696 https://musescore.org/en/node/333696
  - reikonomusha 3y ago
    "Critical", in my book, means "required in order to accomplish the purported goal of the software". With this definition, your desired feature is in no way essential. It may be annoying or aggravating to you that this feature does not exist (in a similar way that Ctrl+C not working in Emacs is annoying and aggravating to a Windows user), but one can write and edit full orchestral scores with what MuseScore offers out of the box.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      Depends on what you think the goal is, I guess.
  - bilboa 3y ago
    I suppose the main reason I think it's hyperbolic is because I disagree with you that this is a critical feature. First of all, I've written lots of scores with MuseScore and Sibelius and I don't remember ever missing this feature. It's possible at some point I tried to drag a note around and realized I couldn't, but if so I've forgotten because it's not remotely close to being a critical feature for writing scores, at least not with my workflow. Second, I'd point out that Sibelius also doesn't allow dragging notes around, and now that I think of it, I haven't seen any GUI notation software that does. Either the developers of all of these apps made the same oversight and haven't realized how obviously critical and non-problematic this feature is, or, maybe the people who responded to you on MuseScore forums explaining that it actually would be a problematic feature are right.
vunderba 3y ago
I think you're being unnecessarily harsh considering that it's not a paid option. That being said the lack of a graceful reflow option that allows you to delete/add/insert notes and have everything reflow across the musical bars drives me absolutely nuts, and is one of the foundational reasons why I don't use MuseScore. As a result, I end up having to do a great deal of musical arrangement work in guitar pro of all applications. Then I can export and import it into MuseScore for final touches.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Thanks for the reply. It's interesting that you find the lack of this feature significant enough to avoid the software. As far as being harsh, OK maybe. But hey, I did change "shit" to "trash!"
hluska 3y ago
I downvoted you because of your “keep downvoting, apologists’ comment. Your original comment was overly aggressive hyperbole. Instead of realizing your comment was the problem, you decided that we’re all just musescore shills. That’s boring.

reikonomusha 3y ago

I don't know if an extraordinarily complex GUI program that services a hundred different kinds of users lacking a single feature is enough to classify it as garbage. What alternative open-source, well-maintained, GUI-based engraving software would you recommend?

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
This is basic editing functionality, a core part of the purpose of the application. You can call being able to edit a score "a feature," but it's hard to imagine what is more fundamental to it.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  What alternative open-source, well-maintained, GUI-based engraving software that features this "basic editing functionality" would you recommend?
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    I would argue that this constitutes not well-maintained. It's not like the feature is being requested in an mp3 player, it's a music score editor that refuses to allow editing a music score. Even if there is no other better, so what? It doesn't make it valueless garbage either necessarily, and so I agree with the downvotes on the original comment. But this point by itself seems perfectly valid to me. "Well-maintained" definitely takes a ding to it's polish at the very least.
    - reikonomusha 3y ago
      The score can be edited just fine, though not in the way you're used to or prefer. It doesn't make your request or others' invalid, but it's simply wrong and preposterous to suggest that MuseScore doesn't allow scores to be edited.
      - Brian_K_White 3y ago
        Not me. I'm a bystander.
      - kazinator 3y ago
        An executable file in /usr/bin can be edited just fine, just not in the way you'd prefer. So much so that certain licenses can legally prevent you from redistributing that binary without source. How easy something is to edit matters --- so much so that legality can hinge on it.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  I’ve been using it for many years now and I’ve never found myself wanting to reorder notes by dragging them around. The difficulty (among others) is that dragging is reserved for small visual adjustments. If it were also capable of moving notes from one beat to another, people would find themselves trying to make a visual adjustment and suddenly moving their note to the next beat over. It doesn’t make any sense. Use note input mode instead of the mouse and you’ll have an easier time.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    > I’ve never found myself wanting to reorder notes by dragging them around I cannot imagine using a program like MuseScore for anything other than composing original music, whose content is not known at the outset. Pretty much everyone who defends the MuseScore UI turns out to be more of a music typist. (And, sure, that is an entirely legitimate, necessary activity in professional music.) "Oh, give it a few weeks of learning, and you too will be transcribing existing music (for your whole orchestra even!) in a clean left-to-right pass whereby you don't have to go back and do anything more complicated than adjusting a wrong note pitch."
    - ksenzee 3y ago
      I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, but I have been composing original music—not transcribing or “typing”—for many years in MuseScore. I do not use the mouse for note entry. I cannot imagine wanting to use the mouse for note entry. The computer keyboard in note entry mode is so much faster than clicking around with a mouse.
      - kazinator 3y ago
        Do you have any videos of you composing, or else someone else doing same using a very similar workflow? There must be some reason you are unimpeded, such as having excellent grasp of music notation? Like if you hear a syncopated rhythm in your head, or tap it out, do you know the exact rest values you need to insert to achieve it? If I'm doing it, I need to be able to take a stab at it, play it back, and easily adjust it as needed, like add another sixteenth rest here, and delete one there.
kazinator 3y ago
As an alternative to MuseScore, I'd recommend moving to a monastery, where you write music by candlelight with a quill and inkwell, while wearing a hair shirt.

highmastdon 3y ago

This and a feature to “insert” note lengths instead of “overwriting” them, is imo a fundamental piece of missing feature. I have the same experience with posting a request for help in this direction. They’re very pedantic when it comes to how a person uses the software. (The use case I need this for us when I want to transcribe music by ear. I first use my MIDI device to type all the notes, and subsequently modify the lengths. Currently I have to cut, modify length, paste, repeat. For every, single, note, rest… Extremely annoying) If anyone knows software that can help me with this, or another way to transcribe music wrt my use case, let me know!

reikonomusha 3y ago
As far as open-source software is concerned, you can use Lilypond [1]. Fully text-based transcription. You can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. to your heart's content in your favorite text editor and get a high-quality engraving as output. [1] https://lilypond.org/ https://lilypond.org/
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  As much as lilypond is awesome, it really is NOT the same sort of tool as musescore. Lilypond's purpose is to create "beautiful engraved (printed) scores". Musescore is as much a compositional tool as anything else, although the (now-former) project lead does value the printed output too, and believes that Musescore is now better than lilypond in several ways.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    LilyPond is much, much better suited toward writing music that doesn't exist yet and is changing as you invent it. Because, as reikonomusha put it in the previous comment, "you can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. to your heart's content in your favorite text editor", which makes the overwhelming difference. You don't see the notation as you're entering it, but you have a way to iterate on that. However, it greatly helps if you're a developer or computer scientist, since you're working with a compiled markup language. LilyPond isn't the answer for regular mortals. LilyPond has sane playback. If the piece you've written is 3 bars long so far, and you play the MIDI file that pops out of the compile, you hear 3 bars and then it terminates. MuseScore requires you to specify the number of bars before you compose and then gives you sheet full of that many empty bars. When you click play, it plays through all the notes you have composed so far ... and then doesn't stop! It goes through the empty bars. It's like the Forrest Gump of music programs. Run, MuseScore, run! If you put a double bar in its path, it doesn't get fooled: that's not the actual end of the file, so it blows right through it.

asddubs 3y ago

Interesting, I don't know anything about music notation, why do they say this isn't/shouldn't be a feature on the forums?

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
I haven't found a clear explanation. Forum trolls simply pounce on those who ask, pretending that this is a crazy suggestion that can't be accomplished by a computer. Example of the FUD: "dragging is the most dangerous way to move anything. If you have notes in the wrong place, simply re-enter them in the correct place and delete anything left over." When asked why it was "dangerous," there was no reply. These people rabidly defend a mode of operation that requires you to continually delete your work and re-do it. Apologists lash out at anyone who insinuates that MuseScore's functionality falls short of miraculous. I mean... you can see it in a comment above.
- reikonomusha 3y ago
  As is the case with a lot of open source software: The people who volunteer their time to help build it get to prioritize what they please. The people building it don't feel your pain in being unable to drag notes around the score, and so they don't want to spend their nights and weekends building a complex feature* that they don't need. The beauty of open source software is that if you find a cohort of software engineers interested in making this feature happen, you can make it happen. But that's hard to get people to build stuff for free, isn't it? * The feature is complex. Notes most likely have data and constraints attached to them (e.g., a crescendo might terminate on a note). What happens if you drag a tied note? What if you drag a note from one measure to another? Can you drag between voices? This is a huge feature if you want to make it actually work for practical scores.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Certainly if you have inter-note dependencies (or other multi-note expressions) things get complicated. But dragging notes or other elements can be disallowed where those dependencies exist. All I wanted to do was swap the position of a quarter note and a quarter rest, and couldn't do it. That's absurd.

bilboa 3y ago

I downvoted your comment, not because I'm a MuseScore apologist, but just because calling an extraordinarily complex piece of software like this "trash" just because it's missing an obviously-useful-but-non-critical feature, seems extremely hyperbolic.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
I consider the feature critical. Why on earth present a GUI and then tell people not to use it as a GUI? What is the purpose of letting you grab and drag things on the staff then, if this is a huge no-no? And how is this "hyperbolic?" A quick search will show you that this is a question that is asked numerous times about MuseScore. Examples: https://musescore.org/en/node/321194 https://musescore.org/en/node/321194 https://musescore.org/en/node/333696 https://musescore.org/en/node/333696
- reikonomusha 3y ago
  "Critical", in my book, means "required in order to accomplish the purported goal of the software". With this definition, your desired feature is in no way essential. It may be annoying or aggravating to you that this feature does not exist (in a similar way that Ctrl+C not working in Emacs is annoying and aggravating to a Windows user), but one can write and edit full orchestral scores with what MuseScore offers out of the box.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Depends on what you think the goal is, I guess.
- bilboa 3y ago
  I suppose the main reason I think it's hyperbolic is because I disagree with you that this is a critical feature. First of all, I've written lots of scores with MuseScore and Sibelius and I don't remember ever missing this feature. It's possible at some point I tried to drag a note around and realized I couldn't, but if so I've forgotten because it's not remotely close to being a critical feature for writing scores, at least not with my workflow. Second, I'd point out that Sibelius also doesn't allow dragging notes around, and now that I think of it, I haven't seen any GUI notation software that does. Either the developers of all of these apps made the same oversight and haven't realized how obviously critical and non-problematic this feature is, or, maybe the people who responded to you on MuseScore forums explaining that it actually would be a problematic feature are right.

vunderba 3y ago

I think you're being unnecessarily harsh considering that it's not a paid option. That being said the lack of a graceful reflow option that allows you to delete/add/insert notes and have everything reflow across the musical bars drives me absolutely nuts, and is one of the foundational reasons why I don't use MuseScore. As a result, I end up having to do a great deal of musical arrangement work in guitar pro of all applications. Then I can export and import it into MuseScore for final touches.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Thanks for the reply. It's interesting that you find the lack of this feature significant enough to avoid the software. As far as being harsh, OK maybe. But hey, I did change "shit" to "trash!"

hluska 3y ago

I downvoted you because of your “keep downvoting, apologists’ comment. Your original comment was overly aggressive hyperbole. Instead of realizing your comment was the problem, you decided that we’re all just musescore shills. That’s boring.