MuseScore or ... ?

[Christian Miller]

I just say I’m starting to get a little bit annoyed by Tantacrul’s tone of voice when discussing the shortcomings inconsistencies of various music notation packages.

It was funny before he was the head of development of Musescore and now I judge him furiously when I stare at my horrendous looking chord symbols.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[James W]

My main problem with Musescore is that it doesn't do this automatically: "it's convention to remind the musician that they are back to the key signature by adding another accidental to match the key signature":

Attachment 123169

That's not the convention. An accidental only lasts as long as the bar it's in. Perhaps occasionally a composer or editor will do it if they feel it's necessary like perhaps if a note is tied over a barline or something.

Speaking of accidentals, I decided from the outset of transcribing 'Mars' by John Coltrane that every note would have its own accidental, since it cannot be written down into bars (while I realised a little later that Lewis Porter's transcription of 'Venus' features accidentals that last as long as the line...)

[GuyBoden]

That's not the convention.

Correct, it's a common courtesy.

I am thinking of becoming an advocate for 'Common Courtesy', but not only in the field of music notation.

[rpjazzguitar]

You put in the courtesy accidental when you figure that you're going to need it next month when you try to play the chart.

It's not technically necessary, but it's there to reduce clams.

When you have an accidental tied across a barline, the rest of the notes in the latter bar are not changed by the accidental in the prior bar and the tied note. But, if you don't think your reader will know that, you can put in the courtesy accidental.

Or in any other situation in which you think the reader will be helped by it and you're not doing more harm than good.

[sgcim]

You put in the courtesy accidental when you figure that you're going to need it next month when you try to play the chart.

It's not technically necessary, but it's there to reduce clams.

When you have an accidental tied across a barline, the rest of the notes in the latter bar are not changed by the accidental in the prior bar and the tied note. But, if you don't think your reader will know that, you can put in the courtesy accidental.

Or in any other situation in which you think the reader will be helped by it and you're not doing more harm than good.

This is good advice, but I'll always get these two pedantic trumpet players who will give me a hard time no matter what I do on my MuseScore parts.
One guy will cite "the orchestration manual" (whatever that is) and another guy will just call me over and say something is wrong; even if it's not.
There was a third one who used to attack it just to annoy me, but he must be getting laid more or something, because now he'll just annoy me by saying how great Maynard's version of the song I just arranged was...
I even got attacked by MuseScore itself (as I explained in another post here), so you can't win no matter what you do. As Werner Herzog said, "It's every man for himself and God against everyone, so I just make believe I'm a humble Chinese peasant, and bow down and say "so sollly sir, I do just as you say".

[rpjazzguitar]

This is good advice, but I'll always get these two pedantic trumpet players who will give me a hard time no matter what I do on my MuseScore parts.
One guy will cite "the orchestration manual" (whatever that is) and another guy will just call me over and say something is wrong; even if it's not.
say".

Well said. I have been caught in the crossfire between charthounds. Eventually I told them both that when they disagreed, I was done. Whatever was in the Musescore file at that moment was it.

Minor dustup today regarding using a DS for solos. One guy thought DS was enough. The other guy insisted that DS was only good for one repeat -- and not multiple solo choruses. News to me. Then they started "discussing" how it should be notated instead. Apparently, "DS for solos" was not acceptable. One guy, long term pro, suggested XXX' or something like that, which I can't recall ever seeing, and I do a lot of reading.

[Christian Miller]

Could be confusing. Sometimes you see these things and think - wait did I misread the key signature?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[jazzereh]

I know an arranger who indicates the initial key signature 'for convenience'. That is, in order to not have too many accidentals in parts. Not necessarily the actual key of the piece.

As such, his approach is to not mark the note as being back into the originally noted key signature when going into the next bar [or two]. The musician is supposed to know that's what happens. And that's the way I've always read parts. Too many accidentals gets to be too confusing so I'd rather not have a note accidental 'negated' in the next bar. Besides, once you've read the part once, you should be aware of this and it should not be an issue any longer.

[jzucker]

1. Musescore is not only free but also open source.

2. Musescore is getting better with each version. I have not tried out 4.2 myself but there seem to be many new guitar specific things. This is a review from a website dealing with professional musical notation. Musescore is used by professionals as an alternative to Sibelius, Finale and Dorico.

https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/musescore-4-2/

3. "Able programmers": many of those are volunteers. You could play a part yourself in the development by reporting bugs at Github.

4. To get around compatibility problems you could try to export and import a score as MusicXML. Have not tried that one myself.

On a side-note: Muse Group has just acquired Hal Leonhard Publishing ...

https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/mu...s-hal-leonard/

Just wanted to clarify that finale's musicxml is horrible. It often exports stuff that has the incorrect amount of notes and with fonts that are private to itself. And on the flip side, musescore's support of problematic XML is horrible. 99% of the time, when I import a musicxml file created in Finale v27, i cannot print. It will crash when I print. Fortunately, I can export to PDF and it prints fine from there. I would say about 25% of the scores I have imported from finale come in with an incorrect amount of notes in a measure and when that happens, musescore will draw a red box around the measure and essentially keep you from doing edits until you fix that. Which sounds reasonable but it's a painful process since the fonts, chord symbols and other things are often completely wrong too.

I love musescore but the problem with opensource software is that the bugs and features are fixed based on a popularity contest and not necessarily based on industry standards.

[RJVB]

And on the flip side, musescore's support of problematic XML is horrible

I'm not convinced that its support for its own MusicXML is so much better...

And yes, fixing measures that were imported with the wrong number number of notes is an exercise in frustration...

For font problems I mostly can resolve those in a single swoop by applying my own format.

I love musescore but the problem with opensource software is that the bugs and features are fixed based on a popularity contest and not necessarily based on industry standards.

Is there an industry standard for fixing bugs and features, one that is not based on some form of popularity contest?

Yes, if you're lucky you get some form of support when you paid (or are paying) for a license, but what good is that if it just confirms you there's a bug that will then get added to the backlog to be fixed in some ulterior release?

The advantage with FOSS is that you can actually fix things yourself, or at least add workarounds and protecttions against crashes resulting from unforeseen situations.

[charleyrich99]

As a long time Finale user, the "feature" that makes crazy is the poor note spacing. You have to use the "beat chart to fix it measure by measure.

Is Musescore better in this regard? I would hope a good notation tool would handle this better than Finale. It's note spacing tools are not effective.

[GuyBoden]

As a long time Finale user, the "feature" that makes crazy is the poor note spacing. You have to use the "beat chart to fix it measure by measure.

Is Musescore better in this regard?

Good point, is there an option in Musescore for note and bar spacing? Please

I've only used Shift+{ and Shift+}

[grahambop]

I think the curly bracket thing is basically it, i.e. increase or decrease layout stretch (I think that’s what they call it).

I think you can apply it to a selected range of measures if necessary.

There’s more info here:

Systems and horizontal spacing | MuseScore