Perhaps off-topic but I use MuseScore 3 occasionally and it's great that there's a free alternative for amateurs like me who only use such software a few times a year. But it feels like it such a missed opportunity - it's 90% of the way to being a great piece of software but is hampered by what seems to be ideological attachment to a particular idea of what it means to "edit" a score.
It feels like using a word-processor with a stuck "Insert" key - you're stuck in "overwrite" mode. This works for some aspects of entering music but is incredibly frustrating for others. This point has been raised many times on the fora but they are often dismissed in thinly disguised passive aggressive way ("you just don't understand the model, come back when you do").
This approach forces you to nail down the rhythm and measures first otherwise you're in a world of pain later. While a natural flow for me (and seemingly many others given the number of queries on the subject) is to start with the melody without too much regard for measures and fix up the timing later.
The odd thing is that it's clear that internally/technically, there is nothing that would prevent them allowing you to use the software in a more natural way (that supports cut/copy/insert/paste etc.) because there are ways to actually "insert" but it's made incredibly obscure by the way the UI hides this ability. I got the impression that the people running the project just didn't want to make it "easy" for users to work with a score in this way because it's just not the "correct" way to work with a score.
Despite this, I'm grateful for the effort that has gone into the Musescore series. Also I'll probably check out Musescore 4. I like Tantacrul's youtube channel.
MuseScore has two separate components:
- Musescore.com is run by Muse Group, formerly Ultimate Guitar. This is the sheet music sharing site which has a few controversies with downloading user scores, although this has improved a bit recently.
- Musescore.org is the GPLv3 notation software which they've announced the release for.
Muse is very good at keeping these two parts separated from each other. For example, the new "Muse Sounds" is installed via the closed-source "Muse Hub" (which economically makes sense as providing high-quality samples would be a fruitful business opportunity in the future) through a shared library.
Personally I think that this is a nice balance between maintaining the open-source software and providing features that practically only work with commercial backing - the reason that this could occur so quickly is because it reuses the playback engine and samples from StaffPad (https://www.staffpad.net), one of Muse's acquisitions.
MuseScore is the reason I stopped pirating GuitarPro. Blender is the reason I stopped pirating 3DS Max. Krita is the reason I stopped pirating Photoshop.
I'm doing my best to be fully FOSS these days and I can't thank the devs of these programs enough for giving me faith in humanity.
What happened to their sheet music sharing website though? It seems like they're trying to extract money from the large back catalog of stuff people have uploaded to them.
I have a hard time trusting this company with anything, let alone my time and resources.
Does anyone know if they avoided the controversies of Audacity, given they're also owned by Muse Group?
I had a horrible experience. I tried to buy the subscription and they charged me in USD rather than CAD. Support half explained that the mobile subscription and the website subscription were different things and just happened to have the same dollar amounts listed. But one was implicitly USD while the other specifically labelled CAD.
The new MuseSound data files seem to be the result of the StaffPad aquisition. I haven't done an exhaustive comparison, but the sounds are the same SFZ-format, Opus compressed sounds that StaffPad uses. I don't know if the new MuseSampler is the same playback engine that StaffPad uses.
MuseScore really is wonderful. Use it for transcriptions all the time.
Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM1CcIRzJHE
Obligatory funny video review of MuseScore 3 UI: https://youtu.be/4hZxo96x48A
Same author also has a funny video on the UI of another music notation program, Sibelius: https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI
Wow!
I stopped using Audacity and swore to never use a MuseScore product again after their developers threatened a GitHub contributor who made a crawler with deportation and torture.
> "Upon further investigation, it became clear that Wenzheng Tang is a Chinese national, but not resident in China. As a guest in his current country, his residency status is predicated on a number of conditions, one of which is not violating the law.
> "If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country.
> "This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his - Fuck å¦ä¹ 强国, which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received."
See 'MuseScore/Audacity employee theatening to destroy a Chinese developer's life' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881539)