[HN Gopher] MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to compos...
___________________________________________________________________
MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software
Author : programLyrique
Score : 272 points
Date : 2020-06-15 10:15 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (musescore.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (musescore.org)
| ttflee wrote:
| > We have moved to the new code style.
|
| Finally.
| jancsika wrote:
| Does MuseScore have feature parity with Finale wrt notation?
| Essentially:
|
| Speedy Entry or its equivalent (keypad-entry ftw)
|
| An escape hatch for the user to paint their way out of all
| western notational edge cases (splayed stems, chord clusters,
| crazy slurs, etc.)
|
| If it doesn't have the first then you lose all the copyists
| (gotta go fast).
|
| If you don't have the second then you don't get the contractors
| engraving Henle editions (because control over the score isn't
| fine-grained enough).
|
| Edit: I initially wrote "reliable escape hatch" but removed
| reliable-- at least when I was using it, many of Finale's
| workaround tools were buggy. Stuff like dragging a shape and the
| shape drifts away from the pointer the further you drag it from
| the origin. But you could power through the bugs and eventually
| get exactly what you want and print it out.
| TylerE wrote:
| Just use Dorico and have support for all of that stuff in
| actual notation...
|
| https://steinberg.help/dorico/v2/en/dorico/topics/notation_r...
|
| https://steinberg.help/dorico_pro/v3/en/dorico/topics/notati...
| jancsika wrote:
| What about the escape hatch for things not listed there? For
| example, I didn't see clusters, or [one of probably 20 other
| things I could list one of which almost certainly requires an
| escape hatch]
| TylerE wrote:
| Clusters are easily created as a custom notehead. This
| gives you full control over exact design and placement.
|
| As for the rest, well, without knowing what your items are,
| I can't really respond - but Dorico is AMAZINGLY capable.
|
| Irrational time signatures? Any crazy/arbitrary/arbitrarily
| nested tuplets you care to dream up? True open/unmearsured
| time signatures? Arbitrary microtonal systems? Multiple
| simultaneous time signatures? All out of the box.
|
| But of course it supports the ultimate escape hatch... you
| can import SVG or export the entire score as SVG.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| Oh man, I could have really used the sequencer when I took my
| music composition classes in college. Finale and Sibelius are not
| conducive to actually writing music.
| unicornfinder wrote:
| I'm mostly just impressed by how many improvements they've made
| to their UI since hiring Tantacrul.
| panpanna wrote:
| I feel they are on the wrong path.
|
| Musescore has significant UX issues and things have been getting
| worse with each release. Instead of adding new complex functions
| that are already done better by others they should try to fix the
| basic things first.
| thirteenfingers wrote:
| What are some of the UX problems you're thinking of? Personally
| I've been pretty happy with it so far. (My main point of
| comparison is Sibelius, which I used until I went all-Linux
| three or four years ago.)
| panpanna wrote:
| Scoring directly in the software is a huge pain + buggy midi
| support often forces me to use a different software and then
| import the midi into musescore for printing.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Oh there are some. Some of them have been fixed in MS3
|
| The one that's almost a show-stopper to me and I realized it
| only recently: if you insert notes (between existing notes),
| it won't move the existing notes to the right, but it will
| instead create this "long" bar with more notes than your time
| signature.
|
| Really
| mirkules wrote:
| There are so many weird things like that, but the one that
| infuriates me the most is the inability to move notes left
| and right. The answer is to cut and paste, which - if you
| have already written out multiple bars but realize one note
| is in the wrong place or you're a quarter note off -
| becomes an exercise in frustration.
|
| I recommended this software to someone, and my first words
| were: "This is a powerful program, but it has got a steep
| learning curve. It feels like it was designed and written
| by a programmer who also plays music"
|
| The answer from this person two weeks later: "You were
| totally right. Very frustrating."
| epse wrote:
| Send a tweet to Martin Keary / Tantacrul. He loves to hear
| about people's ux issues with musescore
| moogly wrote:
| I thought v3 was a big improvement on v2.
| ikeyany wrote:
| Here I am still stuck with v2 on Linux Mint.
| stelonix wrote:
| I'm still on 2 too, mostly because I recall being unable to
| use the plugin interface ionsome early version of 3, in
| late 2018; not sure if it was being reworkwd on or whatnot,
| but since I had been using MS to author some books and
| lessons for my students, I was already relying on the
| scripting, with no time to learn something new or wait for
| the APIs to work again. Since I'm stuck in this version
| limbo, I use a library I wrote in Python to manipulate mscx
| files. I think thos is also a mini-rant on how little FOSS
| software seems to care about backwards conpatibility.
| Still, v2 still is much better than any other notation
| software I tried so I'm not switching.
| boudewijnrempt wrote:
| Why not just download the appimage?
| lamby wrote:
| This actually represents a major and fundamental philosophical
| shift in the sense that it takes Musescore from being a tool of
| representation to a tool of creation. I may be overinterpreting
| this of course, but I am reading a lot into how this might be
| following (or bucking) a general trend in internet/tech/wider
| culture that could be characterised as favouring mediums and
| platforms of consumption over ones of curation... yet alone
| creation.
| [deleted]
| hexmiles wrote:
| they actually hired the person behind this video (tantacrul):
|
| 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
| dry_soup wrote:
| Exciting news! This feels like a Blender 2.8-style project.
|
| What's funny about this is that a composer/music YouTuber/UX
| designer called Tantacrul meticulously roasted MuseScore's UI on
| YouTube, and the MuseScore team ended up hiring him, leading to
| this project.
|
| The video in question: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
| gitgud wrote:
| His series of videos on composer software is a pretty
| entertaining look at confusing GUI choices.
|
| I wish there was more critical videos of popular software's
| GUIs.
| afterwalk wrote:
| This UX review video is awesome and hilarious, and also
| illustrate the competitive advantage of combining general
| design expertise with specific domain experience.
| jcpst wrote:
| For those that are not afraid of using a DSL to generate scores,
| Lilypond is great.
|
| Much like using graphviz to generate workflows, you can just hop
| in an editor and start typing out your score, creating reusable
| chunks along the way. There is also a decent live-reload style
| editor called Frescobaldi.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I assume you mean Lilypond. It's great, but the interop with
| MusicXML format (the closest thing to a standard when it comes
| to machine-readable sheet music - and also supported by
| MuseScore) could use some improvement.
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| Do you mean lilypond instead of lilypad? As a developer I love
| lilypond because I can write sheet music using my regular
| development workflow.
| jcpst wrote:
| Yes, thank you both for the correction.
| save_ferris wrote:
| I've lost a lot of faith in MuseScore over the last couple of
| years. Their UX still has some major warts over Finale that
| haven't improved, and they completely screwed over their users by
| encouraging them to upload their compositions to MuseScore's
| cloud library and then cutting off free access to the cloud
| library. They ginned up as much content as they could from users
| and then announced this huge change in access a few months later.
|
| I've lost a lot of faith in this business model because early
| users get screwed the hardest and as time goes by, it's harder
| and harder to justify using this app. Why is it that these
| projects so often promise the world early on only to continuously
| chip away at their own promises and undermine the faith of the
| community that gave them business to begin with?
| marczellm wrote:
| The initial idea of the freely available library was wrong in
| the first place. You can't legally offer copyrighted stuff for
| free download. (or maybe you could if you paid all the
| copyright for each download)
| save_ferris wrote:
| Which they probably knew and ignored early on because "move
| fast and break things"
| Jaxan wrote:
| I don't think Musescore falls in the "move fast" category
| at all. They were simply naive (and underestimating how
| much pop music would be transcribed and uploaded). In any
| case, I found their communication very clear.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| The cddb model! Truly enraging.
| nchelluri wrote:
| That does sound awful. Did they allow a grace period for people
| to download/migrate their stuff off the platform?
| triclops200 wrote:
| They did. OP also neglected to mention that this was forced
| by the music industry threatening to sue them into oblivion
| if they didn't put it behind a pay wall.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Musescore did have separate listings for PD or CC-licensed
| compositions, vs. "no copyright is intended, wink wink"
| ones. They could have allowed access to the ones that were
| properly licensed.
| triclops200 wrote:
| Except that people would often select the wrong license
| as it's a human controlled process.
| save_ferris wrote:
| There's no way that were completely unaware of this
| possibility when they started the service. They did this
| intentionally to get as big as they possibly could before
| the music industry came after them, leaving their users
| high and dry in the process.
|
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _There 's no way that were completely unaware of this
| possibility when they started the service._
|
| Of course there is. You overestimate small companies,
| which might not even have a permanent lawyer on board...
| jedimastert wrote:
| Can you expand on this, or point to an article? I don't
| follow Musescore but I do follow music copyright stuff
| (which I assume this was about.
| triclops200 wrote:
| Yeah. Lots of things that were uploaded to this cloud
| service were transcriptions or complete rips of sheet
| music of in-copyright works. Sheet music is also
| copyrighted and when the music industry found out about
| the service, it got strong armed.
| jbay808 wrote:
| If you listen to a MIDI video game track and use your ear
| to write a violin-and-piano arrangement, do you own the
| copyright to your arrangement, or does the original
| composer?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The original composer still owns the copyright for the
| composition but you own the copyright for the
| performance. Just like if you sang someone else's song.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's a lot of sheet music that's absolutely in the
| public domain, though. Most of what's on IMSLP falls
| under that. (IMSLP only provides raw scans however. There
| is an Open Scores project that's supposed to work on
| making machine-readable versions of those in Musescore,
| but I don't know if their output is freely accessible
| outside their cloud platform.)
| reggieband wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| blablablerg wrote:
| ye olde bait'n'switch
| scottious wrote:
| I've long been impressed with the progress that MuseScore is
| making and this seems like a huge jump forward.
|
| > Under the design direction of Martin Keary, we are making
| significant improvements to the interaction models and interface
| of MuseScore 4
|
| For those interested, Martin Keary (aka Tantacrul on YouTube)
| creates these very impressive YouTube videos of reviews of music
| notation software. His reviews are usually very scathing, but an
| honest critique.
|
| After his video reviewing MuseScore, the MuseScore team spent a
| lot of time addressing the issues he pointed out and eventually
| hired him!
| n3k5 wrote:
| > _For those interested, Martin Keary (aka Tantacrul on
| YouTube) creates these very impressive YouTube videos of
| reviews of music notation software._
|
| 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.)
| mirkules wrote:
| I just watched the MuseScore video. I get that he's trying to
| be entertaining, but he just comes off as a jerk to me.
| Doesn't make him less correct of course, but do we really
| need a blood-vomiting Shostakovich or imagined email exchange
| making fun of "New All" (among other examples)?
|
| 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.
| drngdds wrote:
| As someone who has spent many hours dealing with
| Musescore's frequently bizarre UI, I found it hilarious and
| cathartic
| jedimastert wrote:
| Tangentially related but super cool, Tantacrul was part of a
| project[0] with David Bruce where 5 composers of various
| backgrounds were given the same brief (basic themes,
| instrumentation, etc.) to see how different people came up with
| different ideas. Each of the composers are also worth their own
| follows as well.
|
| 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...
| karlding wrote:
| The original "4 Photographers Shoot the Same Model" [0]
| series by Jessica Kobeissi that Andrew Huang's series was
| inspired by was nominated for a Shorty Award [1] in 2019.
|
| [0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMHISHSRJwdYhG0YFufX84
| Efv...
|
| [1] https://shortyawards.com/11th/photographer
| hexmiles wrote:
| Does anybody knows other youtuber, talks, blog, that criticize
| real-world user interface? Is a fascinating topic
| emilecantin wrote:
| Only tangentially related, but EEV Blog recently did a video
| on PCB design BOM (Bill of Materials) optimization where he
| took a random open-source project as a counter-example.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| partusman wrote:
| Although it may not really fit what you're looking for, there
| was a one-hour video linked here a few days ago that
| critiziced the entire modern desktop GUI landscape.
|
| Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA
|
| Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23480002
| Andrex wrote:
| After I watched his videos I thought the same thing. Almost
| every big piece of software would benefit greatly from a
| Tantacrul-like teardown, but I also realize that such a thing
| would require a whole heap of real-world domain knowledge and
| possibly hundreds of hours of use to track down all the
| issues so thoroughly.
| trashburger wrote:
| I love Tantacrul's videos. The humor is great in general, and
| when you deal with terrible UIs on a daily basis (like I am on
| my job), it hits close to home.
| diydsp wrote:
| I would love to see him critique a niche tracker like
| goattracker or SID Factory II :)
| sjwright wrote:
| _The cheese melts in the microwave; the music melts in
| Sibelius._
|
| Tantacrul's review of Sibelius' might be the most
| entertaining serious critique of a software user interface
| ever posted to YouTube.
|
| https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI
| tobr wrote:
| They really are great. As much interest as there is in user
| interface design, and as much as it dominates our lives as
| designed artifacts, the field has very few serious critics.
| Tantacrul's videos are a great template of how to make
| interaction design criticism both thorough and riveting.
| jw1224 wrote:
| As soon as I saw this pop up on HN, I thought "hey, MuseScore
| -- isn't that the notation software Tantacrul loves to hate?".
| I'm not a composer, and I'd never heard of let alone used
| MuseScore before stumbling on his videos a couple of weeks ago.
| What a great surprise to see they've been listening to their
| critics!
|
| 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
| recursive wrote:
| Tantacrul is now the head of design for MuseScore. Presumably
| he doesn't totally hate it anymore.
| jw1224 wrote:
| Even in his video he said he liked many parts of MuseScore
| -- he never said he totally hated it. His critique of it
| was much more entertaining than scathing.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Open source music notation is a thankless job - notation is
| _hard_ , and when you're composing, you run into corner cases
| pretty quickly.
|
| I'm personally a big fan of lilypond because I'm also a
| programmer (and I also like LaTeX, which has a similar model),
| and I love that with lilypond I get both superior output, and
| source files that I can track with git, which is great when I
| have different versions of some of my works - I can actually
| compile them.
|
| Here's a sample of a simple full-orchestra film cue I notated
| with lilypond which made me appreciate how easy it was to
| override default behavior:
| https://github.com/tunesmith/TheForgivingSea/blob/master/1M2...
|
| Browsing the git repo above shows how scores and parts can be
| structured - from the same codebase, that repo can generate the
| parts for the individual orchestral instruments, similar to how
| many other notation packages can, except with lilypond I have
| total control. And it's the only notation solution I've tried
| that makes me comfortable that I'll have decades of compatibility
| - I can't even open most of my old Finale/Sibelius scores from
| college since I stopped paying for upgrades. Many composers also
| believe that Lilypond has the best engraving quality of all
| notation software.
|
| But lilypond's been stuck on MusicXML support for years, and with
| pretty poor sound output options. On the other hand, sound output
| isn't a major priority for me, I usually use a sequencer or a
| piano to sketch out ideas, and I think there's something of an
| impedance mismatch between notation and sequencing anyway.
|
| For MuseScore to go in this direction implies that they must be
| thinking they're already nailing the notation side. I'll try it
| out at some point to see if the UI ease-of-use makes up for the
| other things it loses - maybe I can use it for lead sheets - but
| I kind of doubt they're moving in a direction to be able to
| support serious composers.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| > For MuseScore to go in this direction implies that they must
| be thinking they're already nailing the notation side.
|
| They're not. There's still a lot of work to do. It's passable,
| but it's not 100% yet.
|
| When you're scoring with Lilypond, what front end do you use ?
| And does that frontend have midi in / out ? I don't really care
| what the internal sounds are, but when I'm scoring/writing I
| like to be at my piano, and being able to play back chord
| voicings/rhythms is helpful.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I personally use Frescobaldi - it works well for my flow.
| Apparently it has some midi input support, but I haven't
| tried that myself. Midi output/generation has also existed in
| lilypond for a while.
| severak_cz wrote:
| Sounds very promising for me as a man who cannot read musical
| notation at all. :-)
|
| I am looking for some software which will do something like MIDI
| -> notation transformation.
|
| PS: Sibelius crashed!
| mkl wrote:
| If you already play an instrument or sing, learning the
| fundamentals of music notation will take less than an hour, and
| practice makes it fluid. Following scores along to music or
| repeatedly puzzling out how to play pieces from the notation is
| what makes it automatic, and happens over time, just like any
| other skill. You start kind of laboriously with counting lines
| to see what note it is, and quickly become able to recognise
| notes directly.
|
| Most notation programs can import MIDI, including MuseScore.
| TeaDude wrote:
| Holy moly! As a big user of midi (I'm trying to make music for
| embedded platforms) the sequencer is a KILLER feature.
|
| I've used LMMS in the past as I still find it much easier to
| compose with a sequencer than an actual music sheet but the major
| flaw is it's midi export not exporting the instruments meaning I
| have to touch it up in Aria Maestosa.
|
| Ps. The musescore soundfont is probably the highest quality open
| source one out there, not a single instrument sounds wrong. It's
| my goto soundfont for composing
| pier25 wrote:
| I find this move a bit weird to be honest. It seems like they are
| targeting the wrong users. People interested in writing sheet
| music usually do not need a DAW. And if they do, they probably
| already have one.
|
| Also, instead of focusing on polishing their product core
| (writing sheet music) they are diluting their efforts.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| They are probably seeing the writing on the wall.... people who
| use computers to compose music (which is probably 90% of
| musicians under 40) don't tend to use sheet music except as an
| output format, and even that is declining along with the need
| for real musicians playing instruments.
|
| Pianoroll notation and all the things that tend to come with
| that just lend themselves to computers.
|
| In many ways this is like CAD transitioning away from
| fractional notation to decimal. Fractions suck when using
| anything measured or derived, as they give you a tradeoff
| between accuracy and readability, that isn't the case with
| decimals. (i.e. is 19/64 bigger or smaller than 9/32? Meanwhile
| it's quite obvious that .296 is bigger than .281) With
| fractions, and traditional music notation, quantization is an
| important and annoying part of the process.
| TomMasz wrote:
| I've used MuseScore on and off, mostly because it's UI frustrates
| me and gets in the way. It's powerful, but it needs a way to make
| simple notation easy. If they're truly going to make it better
| for casual users, I'm all for it.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I've been working on an IDE for music composition
| http://ngrid.io. I'll release it soon.
| sk0g wrote:
| Any hints as to what to expect? Signed up, but the tease is
| always fun :)
| abjecton wrote:
| Exciting times. I appreciate the team's work on creating such
| high quality software. It doesn't feel like some random open
| source software. But it's always a work in progress, at the same
| time.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Every application is a work in progress. They either improve
| continuously or in point releases, step by step.
|
| We were using musescore for our sheet music while I was playing
| in a symphony orchestra and, it was very capable back then. It
| was missing some very niche things (like Turkish Music Coma
| notation which divides a note to 9!) but, it was vastly usable.
|
| I'm glad they didn't stop and moving forward. It's a very nice
| piece of software.
| [deleted]
| alphabetter wrote:
| The thing the most frustrates me about Musescore is the core dev-
| teams irrational refusal to add scroll-bars to the score panel
| (even as an option). Requests in the past have always been met
| with a "you are doing it wrong" response
| https://musescore.org/en/node/268908
|
| Has new input on the design changed this approach?
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I just checked out the product site, this seems extensive and
| impressive. How do you make money?
| bambax wrote:
| As an occasional user of MuseScore (which I like a lot), I'd be
| weary of them going down the DAW path. They really should focus
| on music notation.
|
| There are already more DAWs than needed, some free, some
| inexpensive, and most of them pretty good.
|
| It's unlikely a MuseScore DAW will bring anything new to the
| scene, whereas on the music notation front they occupy a unique
| and very strong position (their competitors being either
| outrageously expensive or not good).
|
| My two cents.
| truckerbill wrote:
| A DAW that focuses on notation rather than piano-roll doesn't
| really exist in the market however. The UX of the apps that
| support a stave is stuck in the 90s.
| Kye wrote:
| Reaper has had a notation view for a while.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Logic Pro X has a music notation view called Score Editor.
| Kye wrote:
| One plus of Reaper is it runs on the same platforms as
| MuseScore. Everything I've heard about Logic Pro is
| great, and I would like to try it, but it's Mac-only.
| panpanna wrote:
| I tried reaper for a day and could not figure out how to
| do anything. Switched right back to live.
|
| 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.
| kchr wrote:
| No, you need to realign to something other than the
| close-knit UI choices made by Ableton. They're trying to
| do something different here.
| panpanna wrote:
| I can only think of 2 daws that lack notation : abelton
| live and Mackie tracktion (now waveform)
| p_l wrote:
| How does OpusModus compare? I'm less than amateur when it
| comes to music and found it from completely different
| direction, so I would like to know opinions.
| truckerbill wrote:
| It looks really cool but it seems like more of musical
| scripting/markup language than a DAW. Most musicians won't
| be touching that.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| I agree. I have recently started taking composition lessons for
| large bands (e.g. 18 pieces), and I've been using MuseScore as
| my main tool.
|
| 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.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| It doesn't need to be "a DAW", it just needs to be "the parts
| of a DAW that lets you make the sheet music sound good". If
| they pull that off, which to date literally no one has, then I
| couldn't care less if it wasn't suitable for general music
| production without the sheet music side in the slightest. Need
| to be try to be FL Studio, or Ableton, or Logic Pro, or Cubase,
| or Avid Pro, or Studio One, or Reaper, or... Do what they
| don't, because they're not going to.
|
| If MuseScore will let me use Spitfire's BBC Symphony Orchestra
| and gives me DAW-style control over how my sheet music renders
| to audio with the finesse that score alone doesn't allow for,
| then that would be something we've never been able to do, and
| it's about time someone did it.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Genuinely curious, why is that better than just having good
| midi i/o? I would think almost anyone doing composition and
| notation, who has expensive, realistic orchestral libraries
| to play things back on, already has a DAW of some type. And
| the type of full control you're describing sounds like it
| could really include a lot. You'd need features like a
| recording timeline and playback control, parameter
| automation, advanced routing options, return tracks, side
| chain inputs, plugin latency compensation, ability to freeze
| or record plugin output to save cpu resources. Pretty much
| everything a daw has.
| sramsay wrote:
| I've long been a fan of PreSonus's Notion (and I say that as
| someone who has a lot of experience with Sibelius, Finale,
| and Dorico). It's one of the few products out there that pays
| attention to the "parts of a DAW that let you make sheet
| music sound good," and I (personally) find the UI easier to
| use than most. I won't say it's the best thing out there if
| you need beautifully engraved parts for a large orchestral
| work and you need super high levels of organization, but I
| love it for composing.
|
| I do agree, though, that no scoring program really let's you
| have the level of control over the way sheet music is
| rendered at the level that Spitfire or VSL allow. There's
| always some kind of disconnect, and I always end up tinkering
| with things in a full-fledge DAW in the end.
| n3k5 wrote:
| TL;DR: It's not about having another DAW. This functionality is
| also important for workflows that have nothing to do with
| producing.
|
| 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.
| signaru wrote:
| Having used both MuseScore and Reaper in my workflow, I
| initially agree that scoring and DAWs are two different
| things, and that I could simply export MIDI files from the
| notation software then take let the DAW do the rest.
|
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| It exists. It's called NotePerformer.
|
| https://www.noteperformer.com/
| djaychela wrote:
| I don't think they will be going for 'full DAW' functionality,
| rather taking the same path that Dorico [1] has taken - in
| allowing DAW-like features to produce better audio output from
| the scoring application, while still remaining in that same
| app.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/
| klipt wrote:
| Seems ironic, didn't MuseScore start as a sequencer called MusE
| that had some minimal notation abilities, which were separated
| out to create MuseScore?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusE
|
| Isn't adding sequencing abilities to MuseScore just ...
| reversing that?
| ThouYS wrote:
| "the first step in achieving this expanded focus", haha I know
| this one, the "expanded focus".
|
| I hope they can pull it off, MuseScore 3 is amazing!
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