MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software
musescore.org
musescore.org
> 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!
They're also quite entertaining. Worth a watch even if you have just a passing interest in UI/UX design and no clue about music engraving.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm9VVia9DFSUVK24lR9mS...
(This playlist contains some other stuff as well, but the interface design ones are clearly labeled in the titles.)
Honestly, it’s disappointing that this is the default way to criticize someone’s work, however bad it may be.
Imagine if your users, teachers or even parents critiqued your work in this way.
Tantacrul’s review of Sibelius’ might be the most entertaining serious critique of a software user interface ever posted to YouTube.
This idea was taken from Andrew Huang (who himself took it from a photography channel) who puts the same sample in front of different electronic music producers[1]
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWDITMZW1XE [1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW9UYOmoXTQmEQecw3Owi...
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMHISHSRJwdYhG0YFufX84Efv...
I'm not an electrical engineer, nor do I design PCBs, but it was still pretty interesting if you're into that sort of critique.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23480002
After finding his channel I slowly worked my way through watching all his videos. One of my favourites is about “sonification”, or creating sound from of data. Might be quite interesting to the HN crowd: https://youtu.be/Ocq3NeudsVk
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
I wish there was more critical videos of popular software's GUIs.
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.
I think it's a promising project but he urgently needs to hire a UX expert.
+1 for platform independence though. I can't understand how logic users lock themselves into the apple ecosystem only to complain about the expensive RAM upgrades to keep Reaktor snappy.
Seeing it go the way of a DAW is disappointing, because there's a fundamental difference between composition and producing - that is, the difference between an abstraction of ideas (a lead sheet) and a final product (a render).
Getting either of these to a competitive level is extraordinarily difficult, and getting more than one is almost impossible ; I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I think this change of focus may end up hurting the project.
Yes, some of that new stuff looks a lot like a DAW, and for DAW users the first priority should be to integrate the notation software with existing DAWs. However, this is different: when you don't write notation for the sake of controlling virtual instruments, but for performers on live instruments, it's still very useful to be able to ‘preview’ scores and parts thereof through soft-synths. You don't need production-quality sounds, but you do need a faithful reproduction of the notation — something that understands ‘pizzicato’ etc. To that end, software such as Sibelius has suitable synths already integrated, which can often spare you the hassle of cobbling the scoring program together with a DAW.
This is also relevant for collaboration. A couple of years ago I gave MuseScore another go because I wanted to facilitate collaborating with a Linux user. The program itself looked promising enough, but I also needed playback functionality (neither of us can play all the required instruments) and getting something cross-platform to work was such a nightmare I gave up after a day of fiddling with soft synths. It had gotten to the point where I was running Linux in a VM and tried to hook together the Jack in the VM with the Jack on the host system. I found software that was able to do this, but only for MIDI, and another program that could do it, but only for audio. It was way too janky. We resorted to just synching MusicXML and doing playback completely separately.
(Meanwhile, there now is a Linux version of Reaper on the horizon, but no idea if its notation component has gotten any good yet. Anyway, it's neither free nor Free, so the idea of telling everyone in a band/ensemble to get that isn't as attractive.)
From that perspective, the potential of MuseScore 4 is obvious. I'll be keeping an eye on it.
But I see the point of how good playback can affect the composition process, something notation software is not known for. Although I believe instrument quality should not be a cover up for bad compositions, there are undeniable instances where otherwise good compositions sound bland or uninspiring when played by the "lightweight" sounds bundled with notation software (as they are not DAWs). At times, after hearing it sound right within the DAW, with my favorite plugins and sound libraries, I am inspired to tweak the composition a bit, via the piano roll.
In such scenario, if playback could be improved, it would be nice if a DAW can be removed from the compose-listen-tweak loop. At the very least, have realistic instruments and realistic (humanized) playing, even before moving work into the DAW.
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.
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.
I've found that Dorico has allowed me to control things that otherwise I would have needed to put into a DAW to do (such as alter played note lengths to my satisfaction while retaining the notation I think is appropriate) - something which was previously difficult or impossible to do.
In addition, being able to have DAW-like control of a mix removes the need to transfer the project (or stems) to a DAW, which can be great, particularly when you want to quickly create something for someone's assessment; yes, in the final version you may well need everything that a DAW offers, but often you'll just need a bit of control to spruce things up a bit and take it in the right direction, and having greater control over this (via VST Instruments and hopefully effects) will allow this all to happen in-app rather than having the (sometimes long-winded) transfer to a DAW. Which can then need to be done again when there's a significant enough change to the music to mean a re-import.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusE
Isn't adding sequencing abilities to MuseScore just ... reversing that?
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...
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.
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.
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?
But yes, apparently it would be violating US copyright law to rearrange music this way.
http://ostrowesq.com/no-you-dont-own-your-arrangement-of-tha...
You can't start a music platform without having some sort of peripheral awareness of how litigious that industry is. They could've tried to build it out more responsibly early on and chose not to.
Of course there is. You overestimate small companies, which might not even have a permanent lawyer on board...
As they say, never attribute to malice that which is explainable by incompetence.
I've seen this kind of thing 100's of times when some naive people get into product development. The team promises life-time subscriptions or other completely unsustainable business models because it _feels_ like the right kind of payment plan. They genuinely want to give their users the best features at the lowest prices.
Then the reality of maintaining and updating a large software product/service sets it. Engineers are expensive. Marketing is expensive. Operations are expensive. What started off as wide-eyed "wow, we're making a million dollars!" turns into "oh no, we only made a million dollars". Expenses start to rise faster than income.
Then someone who actually knows how to run a business steps in and does the Picard facepalm while reviewing the companies pricing plans. How did they ever expect to build a business with such a totally unrealistic model?
So the now battle scarred founders are forced to face the music. Change their pricing and product offering or watch their company evaporate. They aren't doing it to be mean or to squeeze blood from a stone, they are trying to keep their business solvent.
I expect that navigating this transition is one of the hardest things a fledgling business will ever have to do.
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.
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
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.”
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
Also, instead of focusing on polishing their product core (writing sheet music) they are diluting their efforts.
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.
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.
https://steinberg.help/dorico/v2/en/dorico/topics/notation_r...
https://steinberg.help/dorico_pro/v3/en/dorico/topics/notati...
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.
That sounded too amazing to be true, and doesn't seem to be. Typo? https://doricosoftware.com/import_and_export.html (imports MusicXML and MIDI)
https://steinberg.help/dorico/v1/en/dorico/topics/engrave_mo...
Here's a quick sample I just whipped up with the IETF logo.
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.
Also-- are the imported graphics attached to the score or can they be attached to notes?
Also-- cross-staff stems for grand staff?
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.
I hope they can pull it off, MuseScore 3 is amazing!
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
Has new input on the design changed this approach?
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.
I am looking for some software which will do something like MIDI -> notation transformation.
PS: Sibelius crashed!
Most notation programs can import MIDI, including MuseScore.
Finally.