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You're vastly overstating the importance of score editors/sheet music to the average user Ableton, FL Studio, Reason account for the lions share of DAW usage a

You're vastly overstating the importance of score editors/sheet music to the average user Ableton, FL Studio, Reason account for the lions share of DAW usage and don't have them. I follow the feature requests communities around these closely and have never seen anyone request that

Jaxan 3y ago
I have a hard time understanding what “an average user” is. Sure an average user of ableton live prefers a piano roll, and an average user of musescore prefers sheet music. The title of the post is about composition. This can also mean different things. Is it for a band leader to get new ideas structured? Or is it for composing recorded parts? Very different things.
klodolph 3y ago
Reason is notorious as having some of the worst piano roll UX among popular DAWs. I see far more complaints about the piano roll in Reason than any other DAW, so perhaps it is not a good example here. I have Reason, and I just choose to use it for sound design, so I don’t have to deal with the UX issues. Majority of DAW users are not thinking about their activity as “composition”. You can ask people whether they are a songwriter, producer, or composer, and I bet that the people who call themselves composers are much more likely to use something like Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools, or Reaper. I think that it’s wrong to focus too much on the score functionality anyway. There’s just not a lot of tools in this product to help with songwriting. You can’t plug in standard chords easily, or change chords that you’ve added. You can’t rearrange song structure easily. The scales have weird names. I don’t know how to put in non-diatonic chords without changing the scale. It’s expected that Ableton and FL Studio users don’t ask for notation. It’s not something useful to that user base, and if they wanted notation, they would probably just switch to one of the DAWs that has it, like Logic, Cubase, or Pro Tools. Reason user don’t ask for it because they just want to stop using Reason as a DAW altogether, and use Reason as a plug-in to a better DAW.

Jaxan 3y ago

I have a hard time understanding what “an average user” is. Sure an average user of ableton live prefers a piano roll, and an average user of musescore prefers sheet music. The title of the post is about composition. This can also mean different things. Is it for a band leader to get new ideas structured? Or is it for composing recorded parts? Very different things.

klodolph 3y ago

Reason is notorious as having some of the worst piano roll UX among popular DAWs. I see far more complaints about the piano roll in Reason than any other DAW, so perhaps it is not a good example here. I have Reason, and I just choose to use it for sound design, so I don’t have to deal with the UX issues. Majority of DAW users are not thinking about their activity as “composition”. You can ask people whether they are a songwriter, producer, or composer, and I bet that the people who call themselves composers are much more likely to use something like Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools, or Reaper. I think that it’s wrong to focus too much on the score functionality anyway. There’s just not a lot of tools in this product to help with songwriting. You can’t plug in standard chords easily, or change chords that you’ve added. You can’t rearrange song structure easily. The scales have weird names. I don’t know how to put in non-diatonic chords without changing the scale. It’s expected that Ableton and FL Studio users don’t ask for notation. It’s not something useful to that user base, and if they wanted notation, they would probably just switch to one of the DAWs that has it, like Logic, Cubase, or Pro Tools. Reason user don’t ask for it because they just want to stop using Reason as a DAW altogether, and use Reason as a plug-in to a better DAW.