Update on MuseScore 3.6 and 4.0
musescore.org
musescore.org
Tantacrul is a composer who put together some hilariously scathing UI/UX video reviews for some popular composing software tools out there, including MuseScore [1] [2] [3]. The team developing MuseScore then brought him on as head of design.
[1] Sibelius: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI
[2] MuseScore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
[3] Dorico: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8
Compare that "mockup" with the same screen I just took in Dorico
https://musescore.org/sites/musescore.org/files/2020-06/Stra...
https://i.imgur.com/3qKBAGml.png
And that's hardly the only example from the "all new" MuseScore 4.
Certainly no more blatant than the continual tit-for-tat "ripping off" between iOS and Android.
I get the frustration that arises from a competitor having a similar aesthetic but I’ve used software long enough to know that what makes software great is the details, the nuances, and everything else which distinguishes a program from a Winamp skin.
Looking ahead, it would be rad if some form of real-time collab could happen with MuseScore, either with the software or MuseScore.com embed.
Lots of our customers use MuseScore. You can export as MusicXML and load into Soundslice with minimal fuss.
Apart from the considerable effort of having to enter the sheet music, there is one problem. At least where I teach, the big no-no prohibiting us from using this is always the copyright issues.
A public music academy where I teach once got sued by the local sheet music copyright maff^^^organisation. Not because piracy was rampant. It wasn't. It most probably happened to us because at the time, our boss was relatively young and they guessed easier to push around.
No larger music educational organisation will want to touch nice toys like you built before getting a legal opinion they have no budget for :-( Hat off to you for spotting that and staying at the teacher level. Good luck with your project.
P.S. Always welcome if you'd like to have chat about where music education and technology touch!
(I see in your HN bio that you're a Django user — thanks for using it!)
Happy to hear that you're experiencing success in many places. Soundslice looks like a wonderful educational tool!
Also, thank you for your work on Django!
My idea is that I can use it with my teacher during our remote lessons to make our back and forth playing clearer (we both have digital keyboards with midi out). Sharing this over zoom without a good audio interface and microphone is difficult for people that aren’t tech savvy, I’m aiming to bridge the gap somewhere at least for digital keyboard players/teachers, and then seeing if it works or not.
Midi data could be used to render inputs on the remote peer in the case where the user doesn’t have a good enough camera to capture many octaves, though I don’t think that’s necessary for a first release.
Anyway, development of a prototype is almost done and then I’ll be doing some internal testing with my teacher to see if it’s worth opening up to the world, let me know if something like this is interesting to you and I can follow up if/when I need more testing done!
Does anyone know any way to export to/from LilyPond?
MuseScore is miles ahead of things like Frescobaldi with everything it does, but I really would like to compose Lily-style, and all my attempts to use the two together have not been successful (there was a plugin that was discontinued, etc).
As an aside, the typical user of Lily is more likely a programmer, so it would widen your base of possible contributors if you added import support
I basically throw away everything in the generated .ly files except the notes. But saves a lot of effort regardless.
I never found a a Lilypond -> Musescore conversion that worked really well. I did write a very simply tool based on python-ly to at least get the 'notes' to musicxml so that I can import something into Musescore.
That seems like a good workflow to me for the Musescore→LilyPond direction, and speaks to the incompatibility in approaches that make a more seamless integration less likely: LilyPond, as a typesetting engine, is essentially incompatible with a WYSIWYG workflow.
I did a bunch of engraving (probably around 100 works) when I ran a music publishing business. Many of the scores were organ and/or choral works, which are quite complex to engrave (especially compared to solo instrumental pieces). My workflow was to get the notes, words, articulations, etc. into LilyPond with no formatting tweaks, see what it gave me, and then tweak from there. But the defaults provided by the engine were almost always a very good starting point.
I would think that the other direction would be much easier, though, since that's basically the same workflow as copying plain text into Microsoft Word (albeit music notation is more complex than plain text).
With my git repo, I can see diffs over time, I can "compile" different versions of the scores, and by far and away most important, I have long term backwards compatibility. It was just last month I realized I missed porting an old flute duet from Sibelius to Lilypond, and I could no longer open Sibelius due to my version not running on my hardware anymore. Putting me in the position of having to buy an upgrade just to see it. Luckily I found one exported pdf, and that was enough. Now it's in Lilypond and I'm safe.
For about 20 years now, I'm still holding my breath for a MIDI sequencer that runs on Linux and has all the functionality and user-friendliness of Cakewalk 3 (http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/images/6/63/Player_-_Cakewalk_Prof...).
Sekaiju (https://openmidiproject.osdn.jp/index_en.html) is open source and is 95% there in terms of the user interface, but alas it's Windows only and I'm not aware of any effort to make a Linux port. (Don't suggest Wine, because trying to get MIDI to work with that is a nightmare. A nice thing about the current MuseScore is that MIDI playback works out of the box.)
(I speak from frustration after trying to build MFC apps on Linux to varying degrees of success)
Typically this is a death knell for a software project -- however well-reasoned, well-intentioned, and well-planned.
It's certainly not something to be taken lightly or by people who don't understand the intricacies of the original system (Chestertons fence) but I think people are sometimes too reluctant to do this sort of thing.
Only according to a popular, but not exactly scientific, old-wives tale of an article by Joel Spolsky.
Lots of commercial apps that had end-to-end redesigns with improved engines (DAWs, NLEs, etc), and did it just fine.
FCP to FCPX is one example, Cubase circa SX era, lots of others...
Even Joel's example, Firefox, is only viable today because they did many redesigns. If it was still the old Mozilla era-4 codebase + cruft upon cruft, it would matter even less.
The new system is clearly better than the old one. If we had refactored in place we wouldn't have the same system as we have now. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see some places in the new system that are not working as well as hoped and we are working on a plan to refactor those parts in place to something better.
I'm not 100% sure, but I'm under the impression that imdb.com pulled off such a rewrite a couple of years ago.
beh, that's what we did for at some point for ossia.io and it turned out very very well
i've watched this cliche doom more projects than the actual attempts at rewriting/rearchitecting.
midwit managers crying "oh engineers always want to throw everyone else's work away" have basically banned redoing anything, no matter how dire the situation.
> In order to get the release of 4.0 out as fast as possible, we will be porting over many of our less used interface elements and dialogs directly from MuseScore 3. The plan is to gradually replace these with redesigned versions (built in QML) in subsequent releases (4.1, 4.2, etc.).
That doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Keeping track of the modal nature of note input is quite finicky - note input mode or not (both choices can input some notes, but with different limitations), if a note is currently selected or if an area containing just one note is currently selected, will the current input append or overwrite current selection, and so on.
It's a lot nicer for me to use than Lilypond/Frescobaldi - especially when I want to use handbell articulations (martellato, tower swing, gyrate, and so on). I transcribed a couple of vocal pieces using Frescobaldi, and while that worked, I started running into blank walls when I wanted to do something handbell-related.
Really looking forward to musescore's VST support, hopefully it can get to a similar point!
If it were me I would wait until Qt 6 is released. The Qt developers are making some changes to QML that sound like they have learned at least some lessons (e.g. adding strong typing, not relying on Javascript).
Why should MuseScore also be a sequencer, or support VSTs. Those are two very different family of functionalities; making a good sequencer is hard -- as they apparently found out. And there are many of them out there already, many of them excellent.
It's also possible to output MIDI in realtime from MuseScore and use a sequencer / VST host at the other end, with an internal MIDI router in between. I just tested this now and it works well (Windows / MuseScore 3.5 / loopMIDI / Reaper).
I've been writing my scores on Noteflight. Does MuseScore do the same and is it a better alternative? Are the two compatible at all?
Thanks, hope someone has some thoughts.
Whether MuseScore is better likely depends on your exact needs. What’s your end goal — preparing music for printing? Just jotting down ideas? Composing and hearing high-quality synthetic sounds? Creating instructional material? Sharing stuff easily online?
In that case, I think you're fine with Noteflight or MuseScore. If I were you, I'd play with both and choose whichever one you feel is more intuitive.
You might also give Soundslice a try (https://www.soundslice.com/) — it has a web-based music notation editor that has practice tools built in (like a visual piano keyboard to show you where to put your fingers).
It's free to use for your use-case. And though it's not open-source, it was developed by one of the people who created the Django web framework (me!) — so maybe my past open-source work counts for something.
MuseScore the open source music notation app, hosted at musescore.org, is what this is about. It's an excellent notation app, and getting better, especially lately with Tantacrul's help.
MuseScore.com the online sheet music repository is related to the former, but was sold to Ultimate Guitar. They have since taken a very anti-community copyright approach, where they lock all score downloads by default. You need an account to be able to download anything, and you need a pro subscription to be able to download anything that isn't either "original" or "based on a public-domain work". They claim this is in order to pay royalties to rights holders (which in practice means a few large multinational sheet music publishers), but do this for every score, regardless of whether the composers are signed to such companies at all. They have no provision for creative commons and other similarly licensed songs (not scores, they do have that) - everything falls into either original/PD, or collecting and sending Pro fees to collection agencies that have no right to such royalties. Want to publish a score for an indie song? Tough luck, people will have to pay money to download it, and none of that money will go to the artist. All of the user-uploaded back catalog of scores, which was previously freely available, was recategorized as non-free after this change and thus requiring a Pro subscription to download, except for known public domain source songs (i.e. mostly classical/old music, and only inconsistently at that). This now puts hundreds of thousands of songs behind a paywall regardless of whether they should be or not.
MuseScore.com have recently taken to sending vague and rather unprofessional DMCA-style threats to developers of scripts that allow you to bypass those download restrictions:
https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/42
Claims like "All not Public domain content on musescore.com is licensed by major music publishers (Alfred, EMI, Sony, etc.). " are obviously nonsense; I used to have a couple scores that were arrangements of indie game music with CC-like licensing that allows this kind of usage on there, but I took everything down because I do not want to support such policies and I consider it useless if people have to pay to download my score and Sony or Alfred Music get the money, not the actual composer.
When I asked about this on the above GitHub threads, they claimed the rights holders forbid them from allowing creative-commons and similarly freely licensed songs on the same site, other than PD, which also is clearly nonsense (they already have CC options for scores, just not for songs those scores are based on, it doesn't make any sense for the latter to be forbidden).
Their notice is amateurish:
> One of the extensions installed on your computer violates the law. Downloading copyright sheet music without a valid Pro subscription is illegal since copyright infringement is banned by the law. Your personal data are being processed in order to report to law enforcement units to prevent intellectual property theft. If you'd like to download sheet music legally, you need to start a PRO subscription.
As I understand it, musescore.org and musescore.com are related in name only, or what's the closer connection? Does musescore.com sponsor MuseScore (app) development?
Composers don't have an option to assert their own copyright, and musescore.com declares that their work is "PD". It could be seen as uploading to musescore is an implicit grant of PD status.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...