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Comment by ssttoo | Hacker News Reader

Side track: can we talk about MuseScore (mentioned in the article as the collaborator of the effort)? MuseScore is a notation software, an open-source alternative to Sibelius and Finale (and now Dorico). Teachers (at the two colleges I take classes at) still dismiss it as not-worthy of comparison although in my music and composition learning I have not found anything I cannot accomplish with it.

Maybe I’ll eventually find out its limitations but to suggest to new students to buy a “professional” notation software for $600 (or $30/month) as opposed to $0 is questionable in my opinion.

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Professional Music Engraver here. It has a long way to go to be comparable. It requires so much work to get the scores into a usable state that almost no one in the professional sphere uses it. Sure, it would be lovely to have an open source notation engine (and we have a much better one in Lilypond, it's just not user-friendly at all), but to develop that would take a huge amount of effort and have tons of expertise behind it, which the project currently does not have.

So much of the quality of this kind of work is tied to the user and their skills in what constitutes "good" engraving. For most novices, this is a non-concern, which is why Musescore has taken off, since it provides a great entry-level tool for most musicians to make scores. But it doesn't hold up when doing more professional and/or complex work.

You'll be glad to know there is now a full time engraver also on the MuseScore team since last week! Would it be possible to chat with you about what else could be improved? Thanks!

I started working on MuseScore recently (last week actually) with my buddy Tantacrul who I used to work with on Ubuntu a few years ago.

MS4 is going to be a major overhaul, and MuseScore.com is going to be massively improved also. Would it be possible to chat with you about what the reservations your teachers have about it, and how we can improve those areas?

One suggestion would be to implement a mode similar to Finale's "speedy entry", which allows for more efficient entry of notes, dynamics, articulations, ornaments, etc. without moving between modes and pallets, correcting and adjusting and so forth.

Forcing people into paying for the distribution of their own midi files/scores would be one major issue. Of course musescore.org claims that musescore.com is a totally separate entity but they go out of their way to confuse visitors of the .org site. The interaction between .org stewards and the general public is totally bizarre. It's the same trick that gracenote pulled on cddb many years go. It was ugly then, it's ugly now and the copyright excuse just doesn't cut it, all they'd need to do is properly implement the DMCA for this problem to go away.

Hey Jacques, this was one of the main things I wanted to clarify too, after looking at user feedback over the last week. Would you be up for a quick chat to understand better how to remedy this?

Sure, email in profile.

I love Tantacrul's videos, and was pleased to see he's now working on MuseScore. He finally gets to put his money where his mouth is, and I'm fairly confident that he (and yourself) will do a great job with MS4.

Best wishes and happy coding to the team!

CTO at a conservatory here. Although I haven't been in music long enough to really know, I think there is a lot of room here for a great open source product. Sibelius and Finale are too expensive and not interested in offering discounts to composition students. (Who would then probably be lifetime customers, so I don't really get it, but whatever.) Get in touch if you're interested in talking (I'm easy to find).

But what's the problem with teachers "recommendations". Can't you still use musescore (or, better, lilypond) for your homework?

Yeah Sibelius just dominated for so long that people got used to it. I see Logic Pro also does notation.

Logic Pro's notation is horrid though. That's not why you would use it.

Sibelius was originally a brilliant piece of software until it was bought by Avid and the entire UI turned into utter trash. I haven't touched it since. I also bought Finale when it first came out (was in a demo session at the MacWorld where it came out, sitting next to me was Wendy Carlos) and that was the worst piece of software ever written which is why I switched to Sibelius when it first came out. Maybe both are better now, but my minimal needs of today are fine with MuseScore.

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