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.
Yeah, in making the MuseScore review video, Tantacrul got in communication with the developers. He talked with them about the issues he had found, and they proceeded to fix some of them super quickly and shipped it in a new release iirc. I guess Tantacrul was really impressed and positive about the project, so he decided to continue working with them
Your imgur link isn't working. But looking at those MuseScore 4 shots and comparing them to what I see from the Steinberg website, what I see is mostly superficial aesthetics which are on trend all over—not just notation apps.
Certainly no more blatant than the continual tit-for-tat "ripping off" between iOS and Android.
I tried your imgur link again and it worked this time. What I’m seeing here is a couple of similar arbitrary locations for UI elements, similar use of colour, similar flat design popularised by Microsoft and many elements that are common among most if not all modern sequencers.
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.
Sometimes the harshest (but expert) critics do make things better. In my first startup/application in the 80's our harshest beta tester turned into a big supporter because he was passionate about us getting it right.
Yeah, he didn't just say, this sucks, but went into some detail about why things didn't work as well as they could and how they could be made better. The develpers were smart enough to realize that this was really high-value feedback.
As someone who has been using MuseScore daily for the past decade in my teaching, my deepest respect to the developers and community, you have built a piece of software with real impact that challenges proprietary (and very expensive) alternatives. Kudos to everyone involved in this life-changing project.
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.
It’s not exactly collaborative MuseScore, but I am working on a real-time p2p audio/midi streaming service that runs in the browser. For context, I started taking piano lessons online earlier this year, where we meet on zoom once a week and cover material together.
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!
For your teaching, may I suggest my own product Soundslice? (https://www.soundslice.com/teachers/) Essentially it lets you create an interactive learning environment for any piece of music.
Lots of our customers use MuseScore. You can export as MusicXML and load into Soundslice with minimal fuss.
Looks nice. Won't be able to use it for the foreseeable future unfortunately.
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!
Sorry to hear you were burned like that. But we have plenty of customers — including large musical organizations — who use Soundslice. They either work out the licensing agreements with publishers or focus on material that they don't have to license.
(I see in your HN bio that you're a Django user — thanks for using it!)
I certainly hope you didn't perceive my comment as negative towards Soundslice. It's sometimes a bit frustrating to see all the possibilities of technology without being able to use them, just due to the intellectual rights maze.
Happy to hear that you're experiencing success in many places. Soundslice looks like a wonderful educational tool!
Real time notation for small groups, so they can work out exercises (ie, four-part harmony, variations on melodies, harmonization) and also get comments from others. Breaking a large class into small groups is very effective for remote teaching in music theory.
Firstly, thank you MuseScore team. It has made a world of a difference to me - I push for low income students to learn music, and offering a free quality program is invaluable.
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 can tell you that as a programmer with a music background, lilypond has been a godsend. As programming is my day job, many of my notation projects are long-term things that won't get touched for weeks. I have a backlog of 40-50 piano improvisations I want to notate, plus some pop/jazz originals for which I write various different versions of arrangements / lead sheets, not to mention a collection of altered lead sheets for my jazz group. And much older classical compositions from college, and a full-orchestra film score I did once.
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.
I have a workflow where I do my composing in Musescore, export to musicxml & convert with musicxml2ly to Lilypond, and finally do the typesetting there.
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.
> I basically throw away everything in the generated .ly files except the notes. But saves a lot of effort regardless.
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).
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 do suggest Wine, actually. I've just ran Sekaiju with it and it happily played a random MIDI file I selected after changing the output port in settings to TiMidity++ (the first dropdown list in Setup->MIDI device and instrument->Midi out device). It probably also isn't just me, the latest appdb rating of Sekaiju is platinum on wine 4.0 - for the record, I'm using 5.20 staging.
Fair warning: While that program itself is open source, it's hard to patch/contribute to these type of projects if you aren't developing on Windows. Like a lot of Win32 applications it has MFC as a build requirement, which is still proprietary and not straightforward to use outside windows: https://wiki.winehq.org/Winelib_User%27s_Guide#Dealing_with_...
(I speak from frustration after trying to build MFC apps on Linux to varying degrees of success)
Have you tried Reaper? I haven’t personally used the experimental Linux builds, because I depend on a lot of third party VSTs, but if it's anywhere near as good as it is on Windows/Mac it may work for you.
I haven't come across any missing functions so far, should be on par with MacOS/Windows on that. Only the Interface looks a bit old-style and seems to be the only issue right now. All the "expermiental" builds have been very stable for me on Ubuntu Studio :)
Reaper was completely solid on Linux the last time I used it. The only instability came with trying to use a wrapper to use Windows VSTs, but everything struggles with VSTs, wrapped or not.
> After discussing these points at length, we decided to do the following: Rearchitect the application from the ground up to vastly increase our development speed in future (more about this in the next part)
Typically this is a death knell for a software project -- however well-reasoned, well-intentioned, and well-planned.
>Typically this is a death knell for a software project
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.
I work on a project that was a ground up redesign, except for one small (but one of the most important features for our customers) that was ported to the new system. In the years since the team working on the ported part has been given time to make their code better. I have concluded that we could have in place refactored the old code to the new system and been fully functional the whole time for much less cost.
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.
It's basically the same thing. The big Netscape rewrite was from the 4.x code to the 6.x branch; the 6.x branch was what was released as open source, and when the decision was made to build a UI that encompassed only the browser and not the mailnews code, the resulting application became Firefox.
Yes, but Netscape Navigator got rewrote to Mozilla who eventually turned to Firefox. So same thing -- I referred to his example by the (current) name of the rewritten product instead of the name of the name of the original product that got rewrote.
The reason behind this wisdom is that it's easy to suggest a rewrite because you think the current code is too complex. You suggest a rewrite because you cannot grasp the current code. If that's the case, then I think the mentioned wisdom more or less holds up. However, it's also possible to understand the complexities of the current code, and still suggest a rewrite. Then the likelihood of a success is much, much bigger, I think.
I'm not 100% sure, but I'm under the impression that imdb.com pulled off such a rewrite a couple of years ago.
I can think of a few opensource projects where it has not been, and have been involved in a few such successful projects professionally myself.
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.
> Typically this is a death knell for a software project -- however well-reasoned, well-intentioned, and well-planned.
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.
I think 'rearchitect' should be interpreted as 'redesign the UI', not as 'start from scratch'. Most big changes seem limited to the UI (and done as part of a Qt -> QML migration). And it looks they'll do even those piecewise:
> 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.).
I started using MuseScore not too long ago to help transcribe music scores from old books so that they could be rendered as SVGs in ePub editions. I was pretty blown away by not only how fully featured it was, but also how plain nice it was to use. So thanks to the team, it’s really appreciated.
I tried it out back this summer, using it for my very first attempt at arranging music. I was amazed at how well it worked out, but it is a bit fiddly to use. Then again, musical notation can be fiendishly complicated, so figuring out how to make a music scorer that a rookie like me can use at all is quite an accomplishment.
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.
It is a bit fiddly to use indeed, but it is the best free software out there. Nothing compares, and I've tried pretty much all of them. Lilypond is great but it is not an easy to learn on-the-fly composition tool.
I guess the learning curve is a bit punishing. I use it occasionally to write down simple scores I've been playing.
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.
I went from guitar pro to muses core in order to support FOSS. And despite missing some features, I'm happy with the software, and this new version makes me excited. Thanks to the team, their work it's awesome.
I just recently learned about Dorico's VST support and was considering trying it out as an alternative to the workflow I'm using now (compose in musescore, export to logic and then key in dynamics + velocities). It seems really useful to have everything "just work" based on articulation and dynamics markings.
Really looking forward to musescore's VST support, hopefully it can get to a similar point!
I think they will regret switching to QML. It isn't nearly as robust as QtWidgets and doesn't scale to large apps like this very well (I'm not actually aware of any large apps that use QML).
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).
I love MuseScore for engraving. I look forward the 3.6 release, the listed improvements sound really great.
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).
They are indeed compatible, as are most modern music-notation programs. You can transfer music between them using an open standard called MusicXML. But MusicXML isn’t 100% lossless, so you might need to tweak your music upon importing into a new app (mostly presentational stuff).
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?
Thanks for the feedback. I am embarrassed to say it but you asked: I can't read music very well and I like to use NoteFlight to play back scores that I type in to me, so that I can ensure I'm practicing them correctly. That's about the sum total of my usage so far. And I'd prefer to use free software all else being equal.
No need to be embarrassed — we all start somewhere!
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.
Just a reminder that, confusingly, there are two MuseScores.
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:
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).
Wow, I just went ahead and read the exchange from the links you just posted. It really did seem like they were trying to force the repo into compliance knowing they couldn't file a proper DMCA takedown to GitHub, under the guise of collaboration. I understand the need for open source funding, I really do. But getting in cahoots with the music industry, which is well known for how corrupt and draconian in its enforcement is and basically arguing (or rather dodging the issue again and again) that no other licensing models on the same platform can coexist, may not be the right way, even if they claim that the people who take issue with such approach are "less than 50" because in the end, they can simply change the terms at any moment and leave you in the dust.
Thanks for bringing this up! Things are certainly heating up. I've installed that user script since a while back, and used it. Now I see that musescore.com has been updated in this arms race, and it now shows a full viewport notice that flickers on a bit after the page loads - "Unauthorized use of Copyrighted Content" etc
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.
Yes, MuseScore has taken insane threatening stance to everyone who tries to defy them. Just by having the browser extension without actually using it got me a very menacing message from musescore about "being reported to law enforcement". I believe this is very unprofessional and is mostly made to scare people rather than act as an actual warning or message. They could have said that due to the abuse of such extensions they will block the site access until you turn them off like with adblock. But no they have to say you are getting your ass handed to law enforcement. I wonder who will give any attention to a student just having a publicly available browser extension aimed to view and download music sheets based on previously publicly available museScore APIs.
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.
The developer site that documents the API seems to be down now, however.
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?
Not only it doesn't apply in every case, here it doesn't apply since it's not a rewrite from scratch. They chose a specific part which doesn't support what they want to do in the future and will replace it piece by piece while continuing overall development.
Joel also says "it doesn't matter what language you choose". Which is true for certain kinds of business software and complete bologna in certain other problem domains. I think he's written a lot of great stuff, but like many tech talking heads, has a serious case of thinking everything is like the area he happens to work in.
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