Tantacrul’s video about the creation of the new engraving font (https://youtu.be/XGo4PJd1lng) is also an important story about the MS-DOS Score program, software obsolescence and stewardship, and the loss of value that can happen when an industry relies on proprietary software.
Without polemics or politics, this ends up presenting one of the strongest moral arguments for open source licensing.
There's definitely a point about commercial software overfitting on first-use experience as opposed to reaching a higher productivity / usefulness plateau with some initial investment.
That being said, I would not overly romanticize FOSS' achievements in that arena. The lack of investment beyond merely writing functional code and the lack of opinionated design shows in many FOSS products, beyond the point of it being "geared towards repeat users / experts".
A lot of it just has extremely inconsistent interfaces that not only leave visual styling trends but also basic design principles founded upon human perception by the wayside, and that costs everyone, novices and experts.
Additionally, there seems to be a bit of resurgence in productivity apps that favor more keyboard-oriented workflows, or at least also think about how people can become faster and more efficient after the initial onboarding.
> There's definitely a point about commercial software overfitting on first-use experience as opposed to reaching a higher productivity / usefulness plateau with some initial investment.
I would say… sure, that may be true for many apps. There are plenty of counterexamples, and I’d say MuseScore’s competitors (Finale, Sibelius, Dorico) are good examples of apps that are not tailored towards first-use experience as much as they are tailored for heavy users. They heavily rely on keyboard shortcuts and are modal (often to the point of being arcane, but UX is hard).
Have you seen tantacrul's other videos? I'd say besides Dorico they are also relics of that earlier area, like Adobe.
Dorico is an interesting case. I'm curious how they were funded. The general trend with these creative fields is that the labor force is oversaturated and made more liquid with the gig economy, so better productivity is no longer economically motivated.
My experience with this software is primarily from using it myself. I don’t know if “relics of that earlier era” is accurate, and I’m not sure what era we’re talking about here. Why do you say that they’re relics of an earlier era?
> I'm curious how they were funded.
The story of Dorico is pretty simple. Avid bought Sibelius back in 2006 because they needed a good score writing solution—Avid presumably wanted to provide a “complete solution”—but Avid closed the office, and the same team of developers then made Dorico which was bought by Steinberg for presumably the same reasons that Avid bought Sibelius.
Take a look at film/TV scoring, which is where a big chunk of the money is for working composers. There are three main DAWs in use: Pro Tools, Cubase, and Logic Pro. It makes a ton of sense that you’d want to have a score writing program to sell alongside your DAW, so Avid and Steinberg did that by acquiring existing software. Logic Pro can… sort of… already edit scores. Logic is not nearly on the level of a proper score writing program but it’s still fairly solid and works for composition.
> The general trend with these creative fields is that the labor force is oversaturated and made more liquid with the gig economy, so better productivity is no longer economically motivated.
This doesn’t follow at all. If you’re a freelance composer or transcriber, then even marginal improvements in productivity can more or less be thought of as pay raises or additional free time. If you’re doing a proper TV or film production, then you might have something like 10% of your entire budget set aside for music.
Composers aren’t really interchangeable anyway—if you want someone to make a decent score for your TV show, then you can’t find them on Fiverr.
My general impression is that when you meet someone who is a professional in a particular field—even if that field is not highly paid—then a $600 business expense that improves productivity is not hard to justify.
As is true of almost all "creativity" apps. DAWs, video editors, animation tools, paint applications - there are few highly featured examples of this software that do not require a serious learning committment before being comfortable.
Yes, but to me the important difference lies in what proportion of that learning curve is conceptual/inherent in the domain (knowing what 100 filters and their parameters, or 25 different layer blend modes do; Learning what filter you need to apply to get from some initial state to some desired state, etc. In some cases too much of the learning curve is caused by bad design (not discoverable, odd feature grouping that is there for no other reason than the fact that someone cobbled it together that way in V1, ...).
Tantacrul's other videos on engraving software UX show some great examples of this, where improvements in UX can help without lowering the productivity plateau for experts (except of course throwing them back if you were to change what they've gotten used to from one version to the next).
> I guess only free software can buck the commercial mandate enough to do that now.
[spoiler] Here is fresh story to learn: OCAD (commercial app) VS OpenOrienteering Mapper (FLOSS alternative to OCAD).[0,1]
TL;DR: If you are trying to create fully free alternative to proprietary software, be ready to the situation where original proprietary software devs would decide to clone[2] unique/original features[3] from your FLOSS app.
First, it is good that software feature ideas aren't copyrightable. Arguably many of them shouldn't even be patentable.
That means that yes, proprietary apps can look at your software and say, "that's cool, we should do that too." But it also means that people can write Open Source software that takes lessons from proprietary apps. We want software devs working on productivity tools and practical software to copy each other, we don't want everyone to reinvent the wheel all the time.
I mean, heck, can you imagine if Finale came out with a new feature and that was just it, no other competitors or Open Source apps like MuseScore were allowed to offer that feature? Can you imagine trying to build a piece of software like Blender in that world, where Autodesk had a monopoly on "things that a 3D editor can do?"
Second, 9 years to clone a feature in the world of software is a really long time. If you can launch a piece of software and you have 9 years before other people start building similar things... I mean, what else do you even want at that point? If it takes 9 years for a dev to capitalize on a unique feature in their app, I don't think it's the eventual imitators that are the problem.
> The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...". In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's. The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's. Apple lost all claims in the Microsoft suit except for the ruling that the trash can icon and folder icons from Hewlett-Packard's NewWave windows application were infringing. The lawsuit was filed in 1988 and lasted four years; the decision was affirmed on appeal in 1994, and Apple's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.
And then later on:
> After the district court ruled in favor of Microsoft, Apple appealed the decision arguing that the district court only considered infringements on the individual elements of Apple's GUI, rather than the interface as a whole. The appeals court almost entirely affirmed the ruling of the district court, establishing that, "almost all the similarities spring either from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical."
I'm not going to say that copyright expansion isn't a problem, and in general I think that software patents are a giant problem. But surely the answer to that isn't to encourage more expansion or to treat competitors cloning good features like it's something to be avoided.
We should be holding up cases like this as an example of why proprietary developers can't get monopolies on ideas, and we should be normalizing that way of thinking about software. It's not a problem if a proprietary app copies an interface idea from an Open Source app because interface and feature ideas are not copyrightable. We should reinforce in culture that already recognized legal standard whenever possible.
I'm a professional music engraver so I always view these programs in a different light than your average musician. MuseScore has always been the inferior option based on features and quality of output. I'm glad they are actually focusing on engraving improvements though, as it is really the core point of a program like this, to make the notation accurate and beautiful. Whether this new font lives up to the hype we'll see. Dorico's new font (Bravura) has certainly seen a lot of usage in the professional space, even if Dorico itself is struggling to capture that market.
What tools are appropriate for professional engravers these days?
I was a theory and comp major back in the early 90s, and I used Finale to do a few small engraving commissions and to make big band and wind ensemble charts back then. It took a long time, but with work I was able to achieve pretty much what I wanted. Some of the other tools I checked out, I immediately thought, "I can't do that? No way, that's totally unacceptable."
Sibelius and Finale for the most part. There's a few that use Dorico, but it's not widespread as a professional tool yet. The people using it are not using it as engravers, mostly as composers.
The two people I use for engraving/part preparation are both using Dorico. I also use it for composition. It's occasionally a bit sluggish (on a loaded 2019 Mac Pro) but otherwise great.
I usually am working with just a keyboard, bass and I handle the rythmn seperately.
To do my melody I find Muse Score to be way slower at producing MIDI. I actually use ABC Notation in VIM. I can do a whole song in under 5 minutes after using this for years. Its all texted based and as a old programmer I prefer the text to the GUI. I don't have an symphony and so that is why it is over kill for me.
ABCNotion is just a text based notation program. Once I have that I can just move it to whatever format I want.
Yeah, yesterday I played with MuseScore 3.6 a little bit — a lot of fun![0]
As for me, MuseScore now took 2nd place (just after Blender, which keep 1st place) on my Top FLOSS software projects lists.
P.S. The only issue, as for me, that MuseScore 4[1] (WIP) UI would be switched to QML (JavaScript). I tried its latest nightly builds — it looks like common Electron apps & for me its UI/UX looks horrible.
I was quite skeptical when you said "2nd place, after Blender".
That was 20 minutes before. I just finished writing down a full score, including lyrics, without ever using this before. This is amazing software, both in looks and usability. I'm just sad I didn't discover this earlier.
> what makes you prefer SolveSpace to FreeCAD or programmatic cad like CadQuery?
I prefer GUI apps over CLI/scripting.
SolveSpace is my main 2D/3D CAD since SolveSpace 2.0 became[0] FLOSS. (previously used KOMPAS-3D, but it is proprietary)
Now I'm QA (tester) & i18n (localization) contributor to the SolveSpace development for 6 years now, so you may ask me anything about it.
Itself I'm a teacher of design and technology, with a bachelor degree in technical drawing & CGI + master degree in PM, so really like to take part in FLOSS development as UI/UX QA & PM, see my profile on GitHub[1]
In last 20 years for curious reasons also I use OpenSCAD QCAD/LibreCAD, FreeCAD and a lot of other FLOSS CAx & GIS apps from-time-to-time (mostly for testing & bug reporting).
> What do you use it for?
For all CAD-related works (see my #DailySolveSpace[1] resources): solid 3D modeling & producing 2D drawings, simple CAE analyzing, etc.
JFTR, I'm moderator of /r/SolveSpace sub on Reddit too.
Describing QML as "Javascript" is not necessarily all that useful. Yes, you can use JS in QML, but that doesn't mean it's actually done by the app in meaningful amounts, or has a meaningful performance impact. And the Musescore devs, from what I've seen, know what they are doing.
I'm a bit worried about performance with QML since already the UI is a bit slow (not much, but noticeable) and switching to JavaScript might negatively impact that. We'll see.
Of course, for latest PC with powerful GPU, 16+ cores CPU & 16GB+ of RAM performance may be increased...
But, as I has an 10 y/o laptop with integrated, any heavy JavaScript GUI apps (based on QML/Electron) just slowed down performance instead of increasing, in comparison to Qt-based or native GUI apps.
QML is commonly used on <1 GHz embedded devices. Equating QML to bad Electron examples doesn't make sense. (Although Electron/Chromium also have a large range depending on how they are used, in my experience they have a way harder time scaling down to smaller devices)
> QML is commonly used on <1 GHz embedded devices.
Yes, I know as an owner of Symbian 9.x device ;)
But, here I literally means that actual QML coding style stuck to requirement of modern GPU with OpenGL 2.x (GL ES 2.x) even OpenGL 3/4 support.
My laptop has integrated GPU mostly limited to OpenGL 1.x, so all those CSS/QSS animations, which depends on higher OpenGL features, just blows my CPU/GPU into flame.
> QML is commonly used on <1 GHz embedded devices.
1ghz embedded devices with semi-good GPUs*
e.g. the GPU in a Pi 3 blows some older intel GMA chips out of the water, and those are still quite present "out there". Even a 4ghz pentium 4 with such a GPU will feel slower to the user than a 800mhz Pi (which in itself, is not what I'd call enjoyable to use).
Was thinking more the various Vivante things like you get with the imx6 variants - but they also do support the needed OpenGL ES versions. Pis are weird outliers in various ways (and Pi 3 is >1Ghz).
Your 10yo GPU can blit and scroll pixels faster than your CPU, which can deal with layouts and other things in the meantime. Using GPU by itself is not slowing down your apps.
If the app is badly optimised it's going to be slow regardless of the rendering method.
I use Noteflight for music notation but tried out MuseScore, and could not get it working with my digital piano, I could only input one note, then it wouldn't recognize any more.
From limited experience, notation programs require you to enter exact note duration without the ability to go back and make changes. (ie if you change a 1/2 note to a 1/4 note, you will be left with an extra 1/4 rest with no way of removing it.)
I wonder if there is a music notation woftware which allows you to just enter all the notes first, then you can go back and edit the duration- then it will calculate the measures for you.
> I wonder if there is a music notation woftware which allows you to just enter all the notes first, then you can go back and edit the duration
MuseScore supports the reverse of that workflow - you can enter the durations of notes and rests initially, then go back and "repitch" the notes in a second pass.
I remember many years ago using a Windows scorewriter (possibly this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoteWorthy_Composer) which placed notes into bars itself, based on their duration. If you went back and deleted, inserted or modified a note, the whole score would then reflow accordingly, much like wordwrap in a word processor.
> I wonder if there is a music notation woftware which allows you to just enter all the notes first, then you can go back and edit the duration- then it will calculate the measures for you.
Dorico works like that. It automatically rebars the music so you don't have to think about it.
My own music-notation editor, Soundslice, doesn't automatically rebar, but it has a "we're all consenting adults" attitude about note durations within a bar, allowing you to add a lot of notes in a bar and worry about their durations later.
I don't understand why, as an entrenched user of LilyPond, you'd want to use MuseScore either direction. LilyPond has been such a perfect tool for me that I can create better-looking scores with it faster than anything else; a GUI would just get in the way.
Collaboration would be one reason. I have quite some friends that use MuseScore and are orders of magnitude better musicians than I am, but I could help them create better looking scores and nicer rehearsal tracks if they could just export to Lilypond to give me something to start from.
MuseScore.com, the sheet hosting site tied to the app, has been acquired by a bigger, paid sheet hosting site in 2018[1] and has recently changed its subscription model, monetizing the massive amount of community created content by not allowing free downloads anymore.
I'm not in any position to judge them for wanting to make more money but it sure feels like a way to kill off your userbase.
Musescore.com and musescore.org has been acquired by Ultimate Guitar. I’m the founder of Ultimate Guitar. Nice to meet you.
The situation is this: Musescore.com was about to get shut down because of massive copyright infringement. The future of MS Editor would be unclear under those circumstances. After the acquisition, we’ve made deals with all major music publishers plus thousands of independent publishers to license its offering. The downside of the process is that we had to takedown about 1% of the catalog (however the current offering grew x2 since then).
Upside is this:
1. Catalog is still free for everyone
2. Downloads are restricted just for copyrighted songs, because
3. Copyright owners get paid for their content since then
4. Original and public domain songs have no download restriction
5. Since acquisition the team behind MuseScore grew x7 times, as well as open source contributor community grew x2.
6. We are at 3.6 version now, which is the last stable version before 4.x, which is coming this year
7. 4.x will likely feature major workflow improvements, playback improvements, VST support etc.
Thanks for your answer! That certainly gives it some more context, I appreciate it - shame that even community created "covers" need to be covered by copyright now, since they're often quite transformative, but I guess this is the world we live in.
The articles I read on this at the time were putting it in quite a negative light, that must have had an impact on my judgement - either way, I'm happy that you're successful with this model and that you can make scoring music more accessible with your open source software. (I've used musescore from middle school through university, so it's definitely had an impact on me!)
Apologies for making unsubstantiated comments and thanks for clarifying.
>> "We are also building up the MuseScore development team to help the developer community improve MuseScore’s desktop and mobile products quicker. The improvements we work on will continue to be based on the community’s feedback. For example, among other things, there have been numerous requests to improve the functionality of the mobile apps and the quality of the soundfont’s audio. As a result, we have already established a dedicated mobile development team and hired a soundfont specialist to focus on improving these areas. And in case you’re wondering, yes, of course the notation editor will continue to be open source and free."
And this appears to grant the company rights to any code people contribute in case they decide to close the source going forward: https://musescore.org/en/cla
I'm actually a little foggy on this -- is this completely unrelated to the free software MusE DAW (https://github.com/muse-sequencer/muse), that also includes a sheet music editor as well?
I'm happy to see that the MusE DAW seems also to have resumed development after a very long hiatus / dry-spell. While not as feature-filled in most respects as bigger free software DAWs like Ardour, it has a more conventional piano roll interface with a few QoL features, which is why I preferred it for some time before switching to Ardour and getting over Ardour's sub-standard piano-roll.
They have a very interesting monetization strategy, musescore.org vs musescore.com where you pay to access the sheet music library.
Another program I am greatly enjoying is Synthesia particularly because I can drop in any MIDI file exported from MuseScore and learn to play it there.
Sythesia’s keyboard and note tracking is much better than the MuseScore app, and it’s $8 once to fully unlock which is pricing I love.
The other app I’ve used is Noteflight, which I’ve used to simplify some songs that my daughter really wanted to play, to make them easier but still sound mostly right.
Musescore.com seems to be a different organization than the free software project at musescore.org.
There is a relationship between them, but it's a bit mysterious exactly what it is. The boundaries are somewhat blurred. For example, there is a search box on musescore.org that goes to musescore.com.
It's also not clear whether paying for musescore.com funds the open source project.
I’m glad to have contributed to MuseScore 13 (time flies!) years ago. Haven’t tried it in awhile, but glad to see it still going and from what it seems, thriving. The authors are very dedicated.
That's not the iOS or Android app. Confusingly, they (who's they, not 100% clear) publish proprietaryread-only apps for mobile which are not the same as the main Musescore. Also, the playback at Musescore.com uses some proprietary web tools (built on FLO ones in part I think) which are themselves separate from Musescore the main software.
Without polemics or politics, this ends up presenting one of the strongest moral arguments for open source licensing.