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.
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.