Caught by MuseScore's Dark Patterns (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Caught by MuseScore's Dark Patterns (2021)

gadanidis.ca

The article is from a couple of years ago, but their bad practices continue.

I subscribed to their PRO offering, but due to some kind of glitch on their side, I am unable to actually download any scores listed under PRO. When I try to download, the site just says "PRO subscription required"; when I go to my account, it says "PRO subscription active".

The thing is, downloading scores is not something I do every day. So, I would run into the problem, submit a support request and forget about it for a while. Next time I want to download a score, I run into the same issue again, and realize that their support never even bothered to reply to my previous request. Rinse, repeat.

What a terrible company to do business with.

It makes me sad because MuseScore is actually a good software (at least for learning music notation). I was tempted to pay them but I read horror stories here and there.

That’s not a glitch. You cannot download all PRO scores. With PRO you can:

- download regular scores - access PRO scores but only download ones that are not “official HQ” with copyright restrictions.

> The new category of scores called official HQ scores is not allowed to be downloaded or printed according to the copyright owners' requirements. However, these scores can be viewed, played, and used in Practise mode.

https://help.musescore.com/hc/en-us/articles/209542669-Downl...

This bit me recently as I was confounded trying to download a PRO score myself.

If it says “pro subscription required” though like the GP mentioned, that sounds like it is still possible to download the score they’re trying to download. Unless maybe this is just how the site tells the user this is a HQ score… as cryptically as possible.

I was using "download" in a very broad sense. I wanted to view them on my iPad. Is that what you mean by 'access'?

In any case, the site is stupidly bad ad describing what exactly you get for your PRO subscription.

By access I mean you can view them in the MuseScore app so you can learn them and play them, but printing and downloading as a PDF etc. are not permitted.

I wanted to print one such score a few weeks back and was very frustrated to discover I couldn’t.

MuseScore = Fantastic market leading open source music notation package.

MuseScore.com = Stage 4 cancer.

It gives me some solace that the application will outlive the company. Perhaps if they themselves realized this, they would do a better job of stewardship for their community.

Has anyone attempted to fork the project?

MuseScore (the program) is well maintained and under the design helm of Martin Keary, who has absolutely turned the program around in the last few years. It's also an extraordinarily complex program requiring pretty elaborate means for helping its users, of which there's a huge variety. (Musicians, much like software engineers, make use of many different practices when it comes to writhing/transcribing/composing music.) It's not clear what benefits forking would accomplish, other than vague ideological ones from dissociating the software from its incumbent brand.

IMO the application itself is a tour de force of open source. I don't think anyone really wants to fork it. It's the ecosystem around the app that is awful.

But yes, there are various projects to 'libre'-ate these portions of the community, though I don't personally have any experience with them. My own personal beef with them comes from when my middle school child wanted to learn some specific piece, and I thought "Oh I can probably get that done through this great OSS project I have been hearing a lot about the past couple of years. I should support them." Dear Reader, I made a terrible mistake.

MuseScore is trash. You can't even reorder notes or rests by dragging them (and you'll get attacked if you ask about this in the forum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJdKP5SvAc

We're talking about simply swapping the order of notes or rests in a measure, which doesn't change the number of beats or otherwise invalidate it.

Keep downvoting, apologists.

I don't know if an extraordinarily complex GUI program that services a hundred different kinds of users lacking a single feature is enough to classify it as garbage.

What alternative open-source, well-maintained, GUI-based engraving software would you recommend?

This is basic editing functionality, a core part of the purpose of the application. You can call being able to edit a score "a feature," but it's hard to imagine what is more fundamental to it.

What alternative open-source, well-maintained, GUI-based engraving software that features this "basic editing functionality" would you recommend?

I would argue that this constitutes not well-maintained.

It's not like the feature is being requested in an mp3 player, it's a music score editor that refuses to allow editing a music score.

Even if there is no other better, so what?

It doesn't make it valueless garbage either necessarily, and so I agree with the downvotes on the original comment. But this point by itself seems perfectly valid to me. "Well-maintained" definitely takes a ding to it's polish at the very least.

The score can be edited just fine, though not in the way you're used to or prefer. It doesn't make your request or others' invalid, but it's simply wrong and preposterous to suggest that MuseScore doesn't allow scores to be edited.

Not me. I'm a bystander.

An executable file in /usr/bin can be edited just fine, just not in the way you'd prefer. So much so that certain licenses can legally prevent you from redistributing that binary without source. How easy something is to edit matters --- so much so that legality can hinge on it.

I’ve been using it for many years now and I’ve never found myself wanting to reorder notes by dragging them around. The difficulty (among others) is that dragging is reserved for small visual adjustments. If it were also capable of moving notes from one beat to another, people would find themselves trying to make a visual adjustment and suddenly moving their note to the next beat over. It doesn’t make any sense. Use note input mode instead of the mouse and you’ll have an easier time.

> I’ve never found myself wanting to reorder notes by dragging them around

I cannot imagine using a program like MuseScore for anything other than composing original music, whose content is not known at the outset.

Pretty much everyone who defends the MuseScore UI turns out to be more of a music typist. (And, sure, that is an entirely legitimate, necessary activity in professional music.)

"Oh, give it a few weeks of learning, and you too will be transcribing existing music (for your whole orchestra even!) in a clean left-to-right pass whereby you don't have to go back and do anything more complicated than adjusting a wrong note pitch."

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, but I have been composing original music—not transcribing or “typing”—for many years in MuseScore. I do not use the mouse for note entry. I cannot imagine wanting to use the mouse for note entry. The computer keyboard in note entry mode is so much faster than clicking around with a mouse.

Do you have any videos of you composing, or else someone else doing same using a very similar workflow?

There must be some reason you are unimpeded, such as having excellent grasp of music notation? Like if you hear a syncopated rhythm in your head, or tap it out, do you know the exact rest values you need to insert to achieve it?

If I'm doing it, I need to be able to take a stab at it, play it back, and easily adjust it as needed, like add another sixteenth rest here, and delete one there.

> Like if you hear a syncopated rhythm in your head, or tap it out, do you know the exact rest values you need to insert to achieve it?

Yeah, if I can hear it in my head, I can write it out, at least for the genres of music I’m likely to write. I used to do it on paper, so the playback function is nice to have but I don’t need it to know I have the notation right. I’ll fairly frequently make a typo in note entry mode, like forgetting to switch from quarter notes to eighths or whatever, and have to go back and change a note duration, but I don’t get in situations where I would need to insert a sixteenth and make the rest of the measure reflow or whatever. Not sure if that’s what you’re describing.

As an alternative to MuseScore, I'd recommend moving to a monastery, where you write music by candlelight with a quill and inkwell, while wearing a hair shirt.

This and a feature to “insert” note lengths instead of “overwriting” them, is imo a fundamental piece of missing feature. I have the same experience with posting a request for help in this direction. They’re very pedantic when it comes to how a person uses the software.

(The use case I need this for us when I want to transcribe music by ear. I first use my MIDI device to type all the notes, and subsequently modify the lengths. Currently I have to cut, modify length, paste, repeat. For every, single, note, rest… Extremely annoying)

If anyone knows software that can help me with this, or another way to transcribe music wrt my use case, let me know!

As far as open-source software is concerned, you can use Lilypond [1]. Fully text-based transcription. You can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. to your heart's content in your favorite text editor and get a high-quality engraving as output.

[1] https://lilypond.org/

As much as lilypond is awesome, it really is NOT the same sort of tool as musescore. Lilypond's purpose is to create "beautiful engraved (printed) scores". Musescore is as much a compositional tool as anything else, although the (now-former) project lead does value the printed output too, and believes that Musescore is now better than lilypond in several ways.

LilyPond is much, much better suited toward writing music that doesn't exist yet and is changing as you invent it.

Because, as reikonomusha put it in the previous comment, "you can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. to your heart's content in your favorite text editor", which makes the overwhelming difference. You don't see the notation as you're entering it, but you have a way to iterate on that.

However, it greatly helps if you're a developer or computer scientist, since you're working with a compiled markup language.

LilyPond isn't the answer for regular mortals.

LilyPond has sane playback. If the piece you've written is 3 bars long so far, and you play the MIDI file that pops out of the compile, you hear 3 bars and then it terminates.

MuseScore requires you to specify the number of bars before you compose and then gives you sheet full of that many empty bars. When you click play, it plays through all the notes you have composed so far ... and then doesn't stop! It goes through the empty bars. It's like the Forrest Gump of music programs. Run, MuseScore, run! If you put a double bar in its path, it doesn't get fooled: that's not the actual end of the file, so it blows right through it.

In principle that might even be possible with a plugin, but the commands to double/halve durations can also help. Usually I end up just copying and pasting though. I agree it'd be nice to be able to easily arbitrarily shorten or lengthen notes while having following notes automatically shift to accommodate, though it's not the #1 feature I think's missing (I say that as a sometime contributor to the project).

What's your #1 missing feature?

If I had to pick one it'd probably be proper support for score instructions that appear over multiple staves. I was involved in trying to design the feature and was supposed to help implement it but a change of circumstances at the time meant I didn't have time to dedicate to it, so a very-much-simplified version was developed separately. I gather basically it requires editing the template files to customise. I do remember there was significant debate over what such a feature should be called, and that the proposed name didn't really make sense to me (I think it was "system text" or something similar).

If you're not a music notation genius trying to compose a complex, syncopated rhythms where you need the right rest values in between notes, MuseScore makes it very difficult. You can't just guess at the time values and then delete or insert bits of time in any way that is obvious or discoverable.

Here is a question: suppose you decide that you need an anacrusis (or "pickup measure") but didn't specify one at document creation time. Where can you do that? It's not discoverable at all. There is a submenu under Add for measures, in which you can insert measures at the beginning or end, but full measures only with all the beats.

Huh? That's simple - just change "actual" (vs "nominal") time signature in the measure properties.

What is a problem for me though is that the measure properties dialog opens up behind the main window...

Ah, I finally found what you're talking about. This thing has multiple elements called Properties. There is a Properties tab above the left pane. When a measure is selected, a Measure item appears there: a trash button to delete selected measures and a button to insert measures.

You're talking about a right click context menu which has a Measure Properties command. That indeed opens behind the main window. (Is this using GTK+? I regularly see this issue in GTK+ programs on Windows like GIMP; it's been there for at least 15 years.)

I see that I can set the actual time of a measure to, say 1/4 which creates a one beat pickup measure if it's the first measure.

No it's all Qt. I've tried fixing a few cases but yeah, seems something fundamental to the Qt library. I'd like to think that dialog will probably go away and be rolled into the properties pane, which I gather is Martin's (tantacrul's) preference.

OK, so I now know of three instances in different software of a similar issue on Windows: a window coming up in the background.

One is in Qt (as manifested by this MuseScore behavior with the dialog).

The other is a long-standing thing in GTK+, visible for instance in the Windows version of GIMP.

Then there is this funny issue I fixed in something called the Cygnal project (a fork of the Cygwin DLL):

https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/cygnal/commit/?id=5d50aea73aace...

When a program that has never serviced its Windows message pump runs another program via CreateProcess, and that program creates a window, that program's window fails to come to the foreground.

This goes away with a dummy call to TranslateMessage.

I have a vague feeling this could all be related.

I just assumed it was because the window owner wasn't set properly (but it's a long time since I did windows desktop app development). Strangely I can't reproduce the problem now - you can certainly send the dialog behind the parent, but it comes up above it initially as expected.

This is such a common use-case or way of working (write down the melody/harmony first, then fix up the timing) and such a natural way to transcribe music, that it gets requested all the time.

The weird thing is that the software can do this but they've made it so difficult and fiddly via the UI that it's impractical as part of any work-flow but there is nothing fundamental/technical preventing MuseScore from supporting this way of working.

The forums are generally hostile when (new) users innocently ask how to use the software this way - perhaps out of fatigue.

It seems it's been decided that the "one true way" to transcribe music is know how each note relates to the bar structure of music first before adding anything to your score. As a result it feels like trying to use a word processor stuck in overwrite mode.

Interesting, I don't know anything about music notation, why do they say this isn't/shouldn't be a feature on the forums?

I haven't found a clear explanation. Forum trolls simply pounce on those who ask, pretending that this is a crazy suggestion that can't be accomplished by a computer. Example of the FUD:

"dragging is the most dangerous way to move anything. If you have notes in the wrong place, simply re-enter them in the correct place and delete anything left over."

When asked why it was "dangerous," there was no reply. These people rabidly defend a mode of operation that requires you to continually delete your work and re-do it.

Apologists lash out at anyone who insinuates that MuseScore's functionality falls short of miraculous. I mean... you can see it in a comment above.

As is the case with a lot of open source software: The people who volunteer their time to help build it get to prioritize what they please. The people building it don't feel your pain in being unable to drag notes around the score, and so they don't want to spend their nights and weekends building a complex feature* that they don't need. The beauty of open source software is that if you find a cohort of software engineers interested in making this feature happen, you can make it happen. But that's hard to get people to build stuff for free, isn't it?

* The feature is complex. Notes most likely have data and constraints attached to them (e.g., a crescendo might terminate on a note). What happens if you drag a tied note? What if you drag a note from one measure to another? Can you drag between voices? This is a huge feature if you want to make it actually work for practical scores.

Certainly if you have inter-note dependencies (or other multi-note expressions) things get complicated. But dragging notes or other elements can be disallowed where those dependencies exist. All I wanted to do was swap the position of a quarter note and a quarter rest, and couldn't do it. That's absurd.

I downvoted your comment, not because I'm a MuseScore apologist, but just because calling an extraordinarily complex piece of software like this "trash" just because it's missing an obviously-useful-but-non-critical feature, seems extremely hyperbolic.

I consider the feature critical. Why on earth present a GUI and then tell people not to use it as a GUI? What is the purpose of letting you grab and drag things on the staff then, if this is a huge no-no?

And how is this "hyperbolic?" A quick search will show you that this is a question that is asked numerous times about MuseScore. Examples:

https://musescore.org/en/node/321194 https://musescore.org/en/node/333696

"Critical", in my book, means "required in order to accomplish the purported goal of the software". With this definition, your desired feature is in no way essential. It may be annoying or aggravating to you that this feature does not exist (in a similar way that Ctrl+C not working in Emacs is annoying and aggravating to a Windows user), but one can write and edit full orchestral scores with what MuseScore offers out of the box.

Depends on what you think the goal is, I guess.

I suppose the main reason I think it's hyperbolic is because I disagree with you that this is a critical feature. First of all, I've written lots of scores with MuseScore and Sibelius and I don't remember ever missing this feature. It's possible at some point I tried to drag a note around and realized I couldn't, but if so I've forgotten because it's not remotely close to being a critical feature for writing scores, at least not with my workflow.

Second, I'd point out that Sibelius also doesn't allow dragging notes around, and now that I think of it, I haven't seen any GUI notation software that does. Either the developers of all of these apps made the same oversight and haven't realized how obviously critical and non-problematic this feature is, or, maybe the people who responded to you on MuseScore forums explaining that it actually would be a problematic feature are right.

A reasonable response. Priorities differ. But to me the point is to provide a GUI-based means to edit a score. I'm doing bog-simple, single-note-at-a-time transcriptions of trumpet parts by ear... and finding it to be cumbersome as hell. That strikes me as a poor experience.

Reportedly, Finale lets you drag notes around. Can't speak for the others.

Regardless of how important anyone thinks this feature is, I could accept the limitation more easily if the application didn't pretend to let you do it and then refuse. To do so wastes the user's time, which should be stringently avoided.

I just installed version 4.1 and it seems a little better than I remember, so I will give it another look.

I think you're being unnecessarily harsh considering that it's not a paid option. That being said the lack of a graceful reflow option that allows you to delete/add/insert notes and have everything reflow across the musical bars drives me absolutely nuts, and is one of the foundational reasons why I don't use MuseScore.

As a result, I end up having to do a great deal of musical arrangement work in guitar pro of all applications. Then I can export and import it into MuseScore for final touches.

Thanks for the reply. It's interesting that you find the lack of this feature significant enough to avoid the software.

As far as being harsh, OK maybe. But hey, I did change "shit" to "trash!"

I downvoted you because of your “keep downvoting, apologists’ comment. Your original comment was overly aggressive hyperbole. Instead of realizing your comment was the problem, you decided that we’re all just musescore shills.

That’s boring.

that - not in the same way - reminds me of a similar pair of web pages:

https://hackertyper.net - nice

https://hackertyper.com - sociopathic corruption of ad links

MuseScore is kind of incapable of doing any better. And I don't mean that just in a "this company is malicious and needs to be burned down to the ground" sense[0]. I mean it in the "they have a gun to their head" sense.

So, it turns out that it's actually just kind of outright illegal to trade notation charts around. In fact, it's exactly as illegal as trading song recordings around. This is because music copyright has two souls: the copyright over the song itself and copyright over the individual recording of a performance of that song. And it turns out that creating a platform for trading notation charts around is a good way to get sued by the music industry.

Ultimately, MuseScore got bought out by Ultimate Guitar. If you don't know them, they were just outright hosting guitar tab books, for money, which is arguably more illegal than what MuseScore was doing. But because they were so big and persistent about it they had enough leverage to actually negotiate a license rather than just get shut down[1]. So the end result is that now they're called Muse Group and MuseScore's online tab chart database has to treat everything as owned by a major label, to the chagrin of Touhou fans[2] and anyone else working with music that's actually licensed for free distribution.

My personal opinion is that I don't think you could run this sort of business ethically, because musicians do not pay for shit. I'm also not entirely sure they could back out at this point - it might run counter to something in their settlement with the music labels.

[0] The Tweet linked to in the original blog post of someone from MuseScore threatening to get someone deported over song piracy is evidence of that too - or it would be, except Hector Martin wisely nuked his Twitter once Musk took over.

[1] This is also how Crunchyroll got started.

[2] Which, coincidentally, is how Hector Martin went down the rabbit hole of documenting all of Muse Group's crimes against decency.

MuseScore = stupefyingly hard-to-use program geared toward transcribing previously notated music

In MuseScore, you're all right if, before moving on to the next measure, you get the previous one correct so that you don't have to go back to edit anything.

Those who say "you're using it wrong" or "you've not spent a few weeks learning it" invariably cite successes which land into the above use case.

I had a similar experience.

I purchased 1 year of MuseScore PRO+, March 2022 and stopped using it a few months later, but forgot to unsubscribe. I'd get an email or two from MuseScore every few months, but usually just marked read and forgot about it.

MuseScore hid the upcoming renewal reminder at the bottom of a newsletter styled email, two months early and then essentially said 'we reminded you about this change' later on.

An email titled "Your new year of MuseScore PRO+" arrived Jan 29th 2023 - quite a length email with lots of blue buttons telling me to read more about customer success, values of the products, how they've added x amount of new music scores to my subscription yadda yadda.

Then it goes on to fill up the screen with 'top scores' with images, more buttons to explore - where to go for help, discover new music........ blah blah, typical new year new company email. Except the very, very bottom of this email stated 'Oh yeah we're going to be renewing in March'. I had no emails from MuseScore between this newsletter and the renewal. So it fell completely off my radar until I had a 'Payment Received' email.

I then tried to refund, knowing that you have 14 days from subscription - and was offered a discount. The same style as the article, except the offer was 45% not 35% - heavily pushing how this was the best they could do in my really unfortunate circumstance. I thought, that doesn't sound right - and stumbled across lots of articles on Reddit about just quoting their own terms.

I emailed back, quoting the TOS and then received a very robotic 'prorated refund of the amount.. has been issued to you" email.

Since unsubscribing I have started to receive sales emails - that I could block but find it amusing to see how long it goes on. I count, between March 2023 to today:

12 'Spring Sale' emails, ranging from 65%, 70%, 83% off annual plans 4 '[Last Chance] emails, same discount range 1 'For your eyes only' 70% off 11 'Summer Sale' emails, some of them 'special summer sale' 1 'BLACK FRIDAY SALE' 1 '[Last Chance] Summer Sale'

Promotional emails 2023 by month: March - 1 April - 2 May - 7 June - 9 July - 8 August (to date) - 3

I'm just interested to see if the rate of emails continues to grow or will hover around 1-2 per week. Has also become ritualistic to clear MuseScore emails from my mailbox - which is quite therapeutic.

This is why I rarely sign up for the X day free trials, and never if I need to enter payment information. I don't trust myself to cancel in time. Either I know I'm willing to pay and don't need the trial, or I'm not sure and don't want to risk it. The 90days no interest deals everyone offers on the credit cards counts as they type of scam. I don't trust myself to remember so I refuse to sign up even if there are other bonuses.

For potentially shady services, I use privacy.com to generate a card to use. You can limit the amount it can spend to a total amount, monthly amount, yearly amount, or one-time use. Really handy if you want to be sure that you won't forget to cancel your trial.

Maybe, but if they push, technically you did sign an agreement to pay whatever dollars and they may win in court against you and then you owe not just the fees, but court costs and interest (depending on what they ask for in court). While odds are against this, it is still a risk that I'm not willing to take)

I just add a "cancel X trial" event to my calendar and then don't have to worry about forgetting it.

With Apple Store subscriptions I've had good experiences with clarity of the terms which they put in literally the same font as the teaser free trial deal.

You can cancel immediately and use out the free trial in most cases.

Apple also seems to remind me to cancel subscriptions when I delete an app I'm not using that has a small subscription associated I forgot about. They also turn off subscriptions it seems when apps become unavailable.

They also seem to send a notice about a month in advance of any auto renewals, but that may be something I turned on.

They also let me cancel subscriptions without going through the developers own flow / retention game and this is the SINGLE biggest win for me having had to threaten to sue folks both at work (were subscriptions are much higher) and personally.

On non apple products I especially hate the "must cancel at least 60 but no more than 90 days in advance of renewal" terms of service games non-apple subscriptions play, or ones where you have to call in (yes, the same newspapers complaining about apple can make it hell to cancel). This used to be common in copier sales where you'd auto renew for another year after FIVE years unless you carefully calendared and remember to cancel service in time. The problem is with staff turnover etc it's not always easy to keep track of these kind of gimmicks, and often the person you are contacting has also left so you are dealing with national sales departments.

Apple get's crapped on a lot but despite the claims they screw folks over compared to a lot of internet stuff (ads for tech support have bitten my parents, the car warranty deals etc) I have more trust in them then the areas of the internet the FTC etc are managing.

PSA: These are the same people who took over development of Audacity an added telemetry to a previously FOSS workhorse. Should be a special level of hell for folks who mess with the kindness of FOSS, in my opinion. Real vampire shit.

This is why I pay by Direct Debit wherever possible (in the UK). The Direct Debit Guarantee (https://www.directdebit.co.uk/direct-debit-explained/direct-...) says:

  You can cancel a Direct Debit at any time by simply contacting your bank or building society.

meaning the outgoing payments from my bank account are under my control.

Yeah most banks let you do this online too, so it's really simple.

I have lots of magazine subscriptions and it's one-click to cancel.

In the UK you can also use eg Revolut to create a temporary card number which you can then cancel

More and more services are refusing to let you use a single-use Revolut credit card ("This card cannot be used for recurrent payments").

You could of course just create and cancel a regular credit card, but that's an extra step.

Ahh interesting. I hadn’t come across this yet so I assumed they were not detectable!

MuseScore is one of those services that can benefit from the fact that a really good subscription service to the main publishers legit catalogues of sheet music simply doesn't exist.

Instrumental sheet music subscription service seems like an industry ripe for disruption.

Henle has their own app and subscription, which is said to be pretty decent by some of my friends who subscribe. But its catalogue is basically within classical music, so not that much overlap with MuseScore, which has a large number of transcriptions of film/game/pop music.

For many pieces of film/game/pop music, you can't even find a place to buy the original sheet music. There might not be an original sheet music in the first place; let alone a fitting transcription for the instrument you are looking to play. What musescore.com offers, is largely built upon hobbyists' transcription efforts.

> is largely built upon hobbyists' transcription efforts.

Which is the same model as one of the other holdings of Muse Group, Ultimate Guitar. It has a wide database for user-created guitar tablatures for most popular songs. Starting from 10 or so years ago, the experience has deteriorated rapidly; they - push their "Pro" versions at the top of each search result, - overlay a bullshit video on the actual tablatures which is easily mistaken for a video tutorial for the song you are looking at, - user created GuitarPro tabs require an account to download, - there is an ever-present countdown until their 80% runs out, which resets every two days or so.

When I first heard of MuseScore and the fact that Tantacrul worked on it, I was quite excited about an open source notation app but I want nothing to do with it because of their parent company.

Tantacrul himself has questionable ethics at best. He posted a long video ripping on Dorico, got hired by MuseScore, and then stole many of the design elements he'd just been ranting about.

I subscribe to ultimate guitar. The "official" tabs are worth it. Even though I'm subscribed I get sales emails about their courses or something and I could not unsubscribe because whatever they use for newsletters is adblock blacklisted. So eventually I just marked it as spam, which means account related emails from them will also go to spam.

sheetmusicdirect.com has a fairly large catalog available for unlimited online access at $99/year.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Right, Hal Leonard's digital outfit.

musicnotes.com has a subscription at this point. Not a "traditional" publisher in that way, but it's a huge player for PVG (piano, vocal, guitar) scores that isn't Hal Leonard.

I wouldn't mind subscriptions to copyright music, but I mostly play classical which means it hasn't been in copyright for hundreds of years (if the idea even existed when it was composed)

Generally, I have little tolerance for people who would sign up for a free trial and then complain that it was difficult to freeload off the service.

Then I kept reading this article, and I am now forced to agree with the author. These are nasty, nasty dark patterns. You really have to read it to get a sense of how bad they are.

What is the relationship between this service and Musescore the software?

Tangential, but the "setting up your account" shenanigans reminds me of one of the more amusing patterns, not necessarily always so dark: the "doing important things" delay.

Usually a website that makes you wait a while with a progress bar and status messages in the vein of "reticulating splines", as if Hard Work is happening when the operation is almost certainly done in a near instant.

If you've ever searched for someone on the web and found yourself on one of those websites that launders public records as some sort of sophisticated and proprietary PI service, you've probably seen one of these.

I say not so dark because it's just theatrics a lot of the time, with no real stakes for the user, but it is funny. Less experienced users might view the appearance of Hard Work as justifying payment, though, so it's still a tad shady.

Long ago, I was working on a small Windows desktop app. It was a companion app to a much larger app that took tens of seconds to load. The companion app had a requirement to show a splash screen while loading, but the app was so simple and loaded so quickly that it just flashed on the screen for a split second. PM asked me to put in a delay of a few seconds so the splash screen was readable.

Also, fake progress bars that are really just spinners with the illusion of showing percentage complete. These are pretty obvious when you see them move smoothly to 90% or so then stall out.

Yii, yep, this checks out. Recently I needed to transpose a few pieces, so I opened a trial with the intention of just using their app software to transpose a contributor's piece down a few keys so I can manually tabulate it for the lute.

The website claims that you require the closed source mobile app and a pro account for the transposition feature (and makes no mention that the open source software natively supports this). Argh! Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I decided not to go for the (partial) refund, and have half a mind to go in there and just grab all their midis for some generative AI come-uppance (not that you really can... you are limited to 300 scores per month), but the only people that hurts are those poor kids who were conned into submitting their arrangements to that platform. Bad feelings all around.

I know Paypal receives a lot of hate but for these type of things is great. You can start a suscription with Paypal and then disable it from Paypal very easily.

this is one place where middlemen actually shine imho, like apple managing your app subscriptions for you all in once place making them easy to cancel

Yep, but the middlemen that is on the correct position and should do that is your card operator, not the merchant's payment processor.

You should be able to do it on your bank's site. And the fact that you can't is symptom of a really large problem.

i'd love to learn more about this but i think banks don't actually know you have a subscription or how long is it, they just let the vendor charge you repeatedly and you have the option to revoke this permission through your bank (so the result would be a transaction failed upon next renewal, which not exactly the same as cancelling your subscription through the vendor)

I'm not aware of being able to revoke permission to charge a card for a particular merchant with banks - at any rate these days the "merchant" from the banks' POV is often a processor like PayPal or Square etc. But you're right that banks themselves don't have direct visibility into subscriptions - there might at best be a flag to indicate that a particular transaction should be authorised as part of a recurring payment.

> I'm not aware of being able to revoke permission to charge a card for a particular merchant with banks

You should be able to dispute any charge on your card. If you can't then you need to change banks.

Yes but you'd have to keep doing it every month unless they cancelled your card.

I fell for the same bait at MuseScore and ended up paying for the entire year. Now I try to use Privacy.com for subscriptions like these since you can create a temporary card and then disable it.

Obligatory: https://github.com/LibreScore/dl-librescore

It's a cat and mouse game, and currently the ball is in LibreScore's court. This message is dated Aug 8.

https://discord.com/channels/774491656643674122/776384156602...

> MuseScore has patched the LibreScore App. The server will be down for the foreseeable future until I find a solution (possibly by the end of August). In the meantime you can download MIDI, MP3, and PDF using the browser extension.

All these "features" were implemented by engineers. Without trying to dox anyone, who are these engineers? And why did they accept to implement these user-hostile features?

This is not a faceless company, but actual people that thought long and hard about how to trick other people into falling in this trap.

Every dark pattern everywhere was dreamed up by someone with few if any scruples and implemented by someone just following orders, because if they don't collect the paycheck someone else will.

I'm sorry, but "just following orders" is not a valid excuse. Millions have died because people were "just following orders".

I admit that I'm privileged and that my perspective is not subjective, but I - as an engineer - would never build something that I know it's immoral.

Yes, there are people that can't afford this choice, but I seriously doubt that FAANG engineers are in this group, or, for that matter, dare I say it, most engineers.

We come here to complain about these user-hostile features, then turn around and build some more.

Well, I was using that phrase ironically.

In much the same way about paying people to not understand, anyone who works at a FAANG will take criticism of a company as a personal attack. But if one attaches so much of their sense of self to these behemoths, their time would be better spent asking what it says about them that they'd take on "unpaid astroturfing" as part of their job description. "Bootlicker" comes to mind.

Does anyone know if the FTC or another regulatory agency is able to address these dark patterns? I’m sure we’ve all come across these before, but I’ve not seen them named before like in the article. It’s good to see the specific practices taxonomized and called out

The FTC should be able to. They could label it an unfair/deceptive practice, to do so they'd have to go through the rule making process which takes time.

I recommend always using a virtual card from a site like privacy.com where you can set the spend limit on the card if you do not intended to necessarily convert a free trial to a paid subscription.

Can recommend. I made a mistake of once -- once -- using my card in PSN store. It was saved without my say so. As I later learned, I could only remove it by logging into my PSN account from a computer. CC managed to expire there, but when my toddler pressed a bunch of buttons to purchase a subscription, Discover happily obliged. Long story short, that was one of the few disputes I ever lost and I won one against an airline for a ticket purchase.

My PSN is no longer accessible, but any subscription charges are blocked by CC.

There is a lesson here and it is: don't use real cc.

iOS to the rescue! On iOS subscriptions are managed through the system subscription management UI. This can be reliably used to get and cancel "first week is free" offers. This includes musescore.

They got me with this too. Roped into a year long subscription.

The article is from 2021, can we add “(2021)” to the title?

Audacity is headed down this road, headed by the same seedy YouTube creator. They tried to weasel Google Analytics into audacity under peoples' noses, and then insulted the community when there was an uproar.

Got a link?

Why do you think Tantacrul is seedy? I've watched a couple of his videos and thought they were entertaining; does he have a history of doing shady things?

After taking over MuseScore and introducing most, if not all, of the dark patterns mentioned by the article, he took over Audacity and tried to spy on users, berating and banning people on the PR and followup discussions for expressing anger.

Tantacrul here.

I have had absolutely nothing to do with the design of MuseScore.com.

I was hired to work on the open source notation app, which is free - meaning users can't subscribe to anything, so it isn't possible for me to have instituted anything like these patterns.

We also never put anything in Audacity to 'spy' on users. That's verifiably untrue because the app is open source and anyone can check the code to verify it. The actual thing people were irritated by was our attempt to include opt-in telemetry, which is a pretty significantly different thing to spyware. Users rebelled against the idea, so we didn't include it.

Just use forScore, which is what every single professional musician I know uses. It's vastly better software, it's been around a lot longer, and the company isn't evil.

Stuff like this always blows my mind. I saw a Fortune article written by some B-school researcher claiming 12% of corporate leaders were psychopaths... but who would even want to work for a business that conducted themselves like that? Is it staffed by psychopaths, too?

Were all the people who worked for the Nazi government psychopaths? Of course not, they were normal people who were "just doing their jobs" and feeding their families.

Indeed large corporations are good examples of the evolution of organizations toward compartmentalization such that almost every individual human in the machinery can tell themselves that they're not doing anything too evil, maybe just on the order of a small sin like speeding and everybody does that sometimes.

> anti-human design practices.

Thing is, if it was really anti-human, it would not exist.

What it is, is anti-consumer and pro-supplier. Which, note, does not in itself make a dark pattern.

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