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Comment by cobertos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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They do. It’s shitty. For a number of works, they don’t even have the rights.

Often they don't, but sometimes they do. There are "official scores" that have very limited use - you can't do much outside the mobile apps. In particular, you can't edit them in Musescore, so you'll have to reenter them from scratch.

So it seems like "having the rights" and "actually useful scores" don't intersect very well. Music publishers want to publish scores that you can't edit, which I find mostly useless since I usually want to adapt them. It seems doubtful that Musescore could fix this other than by helping users do technically illegal sharing, as they've done it.

Not 100% sure if this works anymore, but a "trick" I found is creating an account when they ask to sign up for free trial, go through the process, don't actually pay for the free trial, then go back to the sheet music you were trying to download and some of the formats such as PDF will now download.

Just be careful to cancel. They are dogs about it. Hate them.

Well, they have a tricky issue there, because all kinds of music publishers come after them for royalties when they host sheet music. Unfortunately music publishers try to extract money even if it's just a hobbyist transcribing their favourite pop or jazz tune or what it may be.

I've always found the website annoying, but you can see and play the scores without needing to pay for an account. (Or even have an account.)

The new "official scores" are an exception; you can't even see them without paying. A step backwards in my opinion.

If you really want one of my musescore files, send me a message and I'll be happy to email it. Odds are other people on the site will do similarly.

The software is free, the hosting and sharing service is paid.

Seriously, if you can't even accept this then let's just ban free software already.

The hosting is also free. I'm not paying anything to store my stuff on their website.

If they start blocking user scores that cover official scores, they'll be over a line.

They already do, but partially. You can upload anything, but can't make it public if they match the title to something known. I don't know what's the threshold / database they use, but if you want to see the message, try to call something "City of stars, la la land" and upload.

If you click on the logo at the top it takes you there.

I tried to sign up for a 7-day free trial, but when I clicked on that I got "You will be charged $3.69 today for one week." so having never heard of them before today, they already have me not trusting them.

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