
MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software - programLyrique
https://musescore.org/en/MuseScore4
======
scottious
I'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!

~~~
hexmiles
Does anybody knows other youtuber, talks, blog, that criticize real-world user
interface? Is a fascinating topic

~~~
partusman
Although it may not really fit what you're looking for, there was a one-hour
video linked here a few days ago that critiziced the entire modern desktop GUI
landscape.

Video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA)

Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23480002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23480002)

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dry_soup
Exciting 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
His 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.

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bambax
As 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.

~~~
TheRealPomax
It doesn't need to be "a DAW", it just needs to be "the parts of a DAW that
lets you make the sheet music sound good". If they pull that off, which to
date literally no one has, then I couldn't care less if it wasn't suitable for
general music production without the sheet music side in the slightest. Need
to be try to be FL Studio, or Ableton, or Logic Pro, or Cubase, or Avid Pro,
or Studio One, or Reaper, or... Do what they don't, because they're not going
to.

If MuseScore will let me use Spitfire's BBC Symphony Orchestra and gives me
DAW-style control over how my sheet music renders to audio with the finesse
that score alone doesn't allow for, then that would be something we've never
been able to do, and it's about time someone did it.

~~~
sramsay
I've long been a fan of PreSonus's Notion (and I say that as someone who has a
lot of experience with Sibelius, Finale, and Dorico). It's one of the few
products out there that pays attention to the "parts of a DAW that let you
make sheet music sound good," and I (personally) find the UI easier to use
than most. I won't say it's the best thing out there if you need beautifully
engraved parts for a large orchestral work and you need super high levels of
organization, but I love it for composing.

I do agree, though, that no scoring program really let's you have the level of
control over the way sheet music is rendered at the level that Spitfire or VSL
allow. There's always some kind of disconnect, and I always end up tinkering
with things in a full-fledge DAW in the end.

~~~
ternaryoperator
PreSonus Notion user here and quite agreed it's excellent. I just wish they'd
rev it more frequently.

~~~
sramsay
No kidding! I'm always worried they've forgotten about it entirely.

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tunesmith
Open 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...](https://github.com/tunesmith/TheForgivingSea/blob/master/1M2/pdf/1M2.pdf)

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
> 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.

~~~
tunesmith
I personally use Frescobaldi - it works well for my flow. Apparently it has
some midi input support, but I haven't tried that myself. Midi
output/generation has also existed in lilypond for a while.

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save_ferris
I’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?

~~~
nchelluri
That does sound awful. Did they allow a grace period for people to
download/migrate their stuff off the platform?

~~~
triclops200
They 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.

~~~
zozbot234
Musescore did have separate listings for PD or CC-licensed compositions, vs.
"no copyright is intended, wink wink" ones. They could have allowed access to
the ones that were properly licensed.

~~~
triclops200
Except that people would often select the wrong license as it's a human
controlled process.

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panpanna
I 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
What 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.)

~~~
raverbashing
Oh 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

~~~
mirkules
There 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.”

------
hexmiles
they 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

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pier25
I 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
They 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.

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lamby
This 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.

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jancsika
Does 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
Just use Dorico and have support for all of that stuff in actual notation...

[https://steinberg.help/dorico/v2/en/dorico/topics/notation_r...](https://steinberg.help/dorico/v2/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_stems_altered_unisons_split_stems_c.html)

[https://steinberg.help/dorico_pro/v3/en/dorico/topics/notati...](https://steinberg.help/dorico_pro/v3/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_slurs_segments_c.html?hl=slur)

~~~
jancsika
What 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
Clusters 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.

~~~
mkl
> you can import SVG

That sounded too amazing to be true, and doesn't seem to be. Typo?
[https://doricosoftware.com/import_and_export.html](https://doricosoftware.com/import_and_export.html)
(imports MusicXML and MIDI)

~~~
TylerE
No, it's totally true:

[https://steinberg.help/dorico/v1/en/dorico/topics/engrave_mo...](https://steinberg.help/dorico/v1/en/dorico/topics/engrave_mode/engrave_mode_graphics_frames_r.html)

Here's a quick sample I just whipped up with the IETF logo.

[https://i.imgur.com/KON2dOm.png](https://i.imgur.com/KON2dOm.png)

Note how it's imported and used as true vector data - even when zoomed way in
everything stays crisp - nothing is rasterized.

~~~
mkl
Oh, okay, it imports SVGs just as graphics elements? I was jumping to the
conclusion it meant interpreting as notes that become an editable part of the
score.

~~~
TylerE
There are custom editors for just about everything (note heads, playing
techniques, lines...$

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jcpst
For 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.

~~~
zozbot234
I 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.

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unicornfinder
I'm mostly just impressed by how many improvements they've made to their UI
since hiring Tantacrul.

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ThouYS
"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!

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TeaDude
Holy 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

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fenwick67
Oh 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.

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alphabetter
The 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?

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prvc
Want 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.

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TomMasz
I'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.

------
abjecton
Exciting 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
Every 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.

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severak_cz
Sounds 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
If 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.

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TuringNYC
I just checked out the product site, this seems extensive and impressive. How
do you make money?

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ttflee
> We have moved to the new code style.

Finally.

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adamnemecek
I've been working on an IDE for music composition
[http://ngrid.io](http://ngrid.io). I'll release it soon.

~~~
sk0g
Any hints as to what to expect? Signed up, but the tease is always fun :)

