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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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:
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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.
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.