Notation Software - MuseScore 4 is in the making

[emanresu]

Cant comment much. Just that I don't have a good feeling about Musescore.

edit: it is good that it's free. is it the only free one out there?

[Christian Miller]

There is a youtuber named tantacrul (has obvious Irish accent). Does a variety of composing related videos.

As I understand it he at some point made videos where he openly expressed his thoughts (bashed) on more than one notation software.

My understanding is that his criticisms on musescore were welcomed and it lead to him starting to participate in musescore opensource project and community and later became the lead developer.

So in my understanding he started making videos where he bashed notation software before he had any affiliation to any of them.

Yeah, this was all pre his current gig. The Sibelius video is very funny and completely accurate as a long time user. Tantacrul also made a video critical of Musescore - and they hired him. I think this speaks well of the company, they can take criticism and act on it.

No doubt in the natural run of things I imagine Muse will get less responsive and more corporate, but at the moment they seem to be doing good stuff.

Avid (Sibelius) otoh couldn’t care less.

[Christian Miller]

Cant comment much. Just that I don't have a good feeling about Musescore.

edit: it is good that it's free. is it the only free one out there?

its not perfect but I don’t miss Sibelius

AFAIK it’s the only free one that can compete with the big boys (Sibelius and Dorico)

[emanresu]

So nice for clearing it out, thanks!

edit:
You actually made my day Christian

I watched that Tantacrul's Sibelius video, found it funny. Then saw him explaining how much trouble they had with making Musescore 3.. I think it was about 3.
Didn't know about the whole story and thought it was in bad taste. The Sibelius thing.

[GuyBoden]

I'm still using MuseScore3, it works fine for me, I did have to setup the audio processing.

[Christian Miller]

So nice for clearing it out, thanks!

edit:
You actually made my day Christian

I watched that Tantacrul's Sibelius video, found it funny. Then saw him explaining how much trouble they had with making Musescore 3.. I think it was about 3.
Didn't know about the whole story and thought it was in bad taste. The Sibelius thing.

yeah that would have been pretty classless lol

[grahambop]

I'm happy with Musescore 3, does everything I need really. I'm currently typing in the chart for Israel (from the 'Birth of the Cool' score book), eventually I might export it to Reaper and record something with it.

[emanresu]

I love musescore. Have switched from finale for the most part.

I'm seeing lots of bug reports on the 4.0 release on their fb group though.

Ok, from now on I'm completely rooting for Musescore.

Thing is - music notation is so much harder than rocket science.
It is up there with OS's, fancy video editors and all that.
It is so.damn.hard.

With a smaller team like they have there, they rely on the crowd who tests it. And better be supporting the effort. Or else, you'd be paying 500.- for a year's subscription for Finale or Sibelius.

[Christian Miller]

Ok, from now on I'm completely rooting for Musescore.

Thing is - music notation is so much harder than rocket science.
It is up there with OS's, fancy video editors and all that.
It is so.damn.hard.

With a smaller team like they have there, you rely to the crowd who tests it. And better be supporting the effort. Or else you'd be paying 500.- for year's subscription for Finale or Sibelius.

join us!!!

bwahahahaha

[RJVB]

Thing is - music notation is so much harder than rocket science.

I think that's not the luckiest comparison. Rocket science evoques hard physics and math laws and relationships that you have to understand intimately to be able to work with them.
A music notation is mostly a large collection of little rules, most of which you just have to know rather than understand. When was the last time you had to ponder a score before you understood what it meant (I'm not talking about harmonic analysis or something of the sort).

Writing a music notation editor can still be a (very) hard problem if you want to implement all those rules efficiently and without them biting each other in the tail. It certainly is a huge amount of work.

[emanresu]

Writing a music notation editor can still be a (very) hard problem if you want to implement all those rules efficiently and without them biting each other in the tail. It certainly is a huge amount of work.

Do you have experience in this matter?

edit: sorry. "rocket science" was a joke thing. It is 1st April.

[emanresu]

Anyhow. When doing a simple tune in any decent notation app, it's fine. When it gets a tad bit more complex, the "rules" get overwhelmed fast.
2 voices on 1 staff - probably need a few manual fixings. 3 voices - nope! Been there a lot. It is way too much to ask - it will never get perfect. The rule set -
it won't help at all when it gets complicated. The apps so far have the first priority to give some space for the notes. To make it all good to read withouth any help from the human - that will never happen.
3 voices on a single staff and it will require manual tinkering always. Add fingering - ... hehehe
Well. It's the basic struggle. But there is soooooo much more.

edit: oh. I forgot. to code this. it is freaking insane. imagine about 500 tiny elements that have to fight for space. all the combinations. there is no nice way to code it. it is larger than chess.

[rpjazzguitar]

I'd been switching back and forth and may have opened a 4 file in 3 and then, later, reopened it in 4.

I'm not sure, tbh.

What I do know is that I never had a file corrupted until I got 4.

I have a tune which goes from 7/4 to 4/4 a few times. I ended up with a bar which was supposed to be in 7/4 in some odd time (according to corruption error message, in 17/8 or something (can't recall exactly). Couldn't even delete the bar and start over. I found a few tricks on line, one of which involved changing voices and then changing back, which seemed to work.

I need to investigate this further.

[Christian Miller]

Tantacrul goes into some depth in a video on the dizzying complexities of devising rules for musical typesetting that a computer can follow. rocket science might not in fact be a bad comparison, in that it is annoying and complicated real world problems based on stuff that isn’t that complicated in theory. (eg the rocket equation and calculating energy released by combustion is one thing but stopping your exhaust nozzles from melting is quite another.)

[RJVB]

it is annoying and complicated real world problems based on stuff that isn’t that complicated in theory.

Typesetting and note setting are IMHO forms of art, and to me that makes them potentially very complicated in theory, ultimately because there's a human in the loop. To make the implementation of a score editor straightforward if not easy you'd need a sufficiently complete and predictive model of what makes us find one score more readable than another. That might indeed be a hard problem.

Or, you could probably use neuromancy, a term coined in the early 90s for a solution where you train a neural network to perform a task using backpropagation. (With enough training cycles you can train a large enough network to map any input to just about any output, but you get something that's worthless as a model of that input/output relationship, hence the "mancy" bit.)
With today's computing power that might actually even be a useful (component of an) implementation where users continue to train the application to typeset scores in ways that they find best.

[emanresu]

Typesetting and note setting are IMHO forms of art, and to me that makes them potentially very complicated in theory, ultimately because there's a human in the loop. To make the implementation of a score editor straightforward if not easy you'd need a sufficiently complete and predictive model of what makes us find one score more readable than another. That might indeed be a hard problem.

It can never be perfect. Too many combinations and exceptions that need human eye to make look nice.
But do you have experience with coding such things then?

[Christian Miller]

People just don’t respect typesetting

[RJVB]

It can never be perfect. Too many combinations and exceptions that need human eye to make look nice.
But do you have experience with coding such things then?

Indeed, as long as you remain stuck with a qualitative model that's a collection of rules and exceptions which is probably never complete. That latter point might well be addressed by sticking a big neural network or other form of fuzzy logic or AI behind, it with continuous trainability. User tweaks things such that everything looks nice, programme learns from that and does better next time (and possibly much worse in some unexpected, unrelated aspect )

I've been hacking around in the MuseScore code (mostly fixing crashes) and indeed written code for various relevant other problems. Feathers in a hat I rarely wear anymore.

People just don’t respect typesetting

This one does (and Knuth).

[Christian Miller]

FWIW here's a demo of the Musescore solo strings playback.

Interesting thing to me is that I didn't put any dynamics in, but the AI strings still use them.

I think the 'scooping up to the note' effect is a bit overdone though, but I have no idea how to dial it back.

[RJVB]

Yes, that sounds horrible, Iona Browned directing the Saint Martin-in-the-Fields after a few too many

[JWMandy]

I noticed the other day that Musescore bought Staffpad.

Then I rediscovered that I'd messed around with Musescore's own efforts at a similar program some years back... I couldn't even remember doing that! But FWIW, I'm still intrigued by iPad + Pencil driven notation - though fairly, my needs are simple solos and not band orchestration level. You guys seem to be doing more of the latter and that sort of complexity is mind boggling. Given that my own efforts at their most complex utilized a fairly basic Tabledit, I have nothing but admiration for your more complete needs and the whole of the undertaking.

[Christian Miller]

Yes, that sounds horrible, Iona Browned directing the Saint Martin-in-the-Fields after a few too many

Haha nailed it

[emanresu]

[sgcim]

I'd been switching back and forth and may have opened a 4 file in 3 and then, later, reopened it in 4.

I'm not sure, tbh.

What I do know is that I never had a file corrupted until I got 4.

I have a tune which goes from 7/4 to 4/4 a few times. I ended up with a bar which was supposed to be in 7/4 in some odd time (according to corruption error message, in 17/8 or something (can't recall exactly). Couldn't even delete the bar and start over. I found a few tricks on line, one of which involved changing voices and then changing back, which seemed to work.

I need to investigate this further.

I've been through that nightmare. They gave me the choice to go back to the last time I saved it,and I chose that, and spent another ten hours finishing the chart, but now I've got to start on part two of the 'suite', I guess you could call it.

[sgcim]

Anyhow. When doing a simple tune in any decent notation app, it's fine. When it gets a tad bit more complex, the "rules" get overwhelmed fast.
2 voices on 1 staff - probably need a few manual fixings. 3 voices - nope! Been there a lot. It is way too much to ask - it will never get perfect. The rule set -
it won't help at all when it gets complicated. The apps so far have the first priority to give some space for the notes. To make it all good to read withouth any help from the human - that will never happen.
3 voices on a single staff and it will require manual tinkering always. Add fingering - ... hehehe
Well. It's the basic struggle. But there is soooooo much more.

edit: oh. I forgot. to code this. it is freaking insane. imagine about 500 tiny elements that have to fight for space. all the combinations. there is no nice way to code it. it is larger than chess.

I think MS 4.0 made it easier to have two different voices in a measure. There's a new thing at the bottom that you can click on called 'two parts'
I've been afraid to try it, but I really need it for my piano parts. I gave up trying to figure it out and gave the poor pianist leger lines on the other stave.