For the intrepid, especially those annoyed with the purported input-sluggishness of musescore et al, an interesting text-based alternative is LilyPond https://lilypond.org/
My dad wrote an opera using LilyPond in vim, though I believe these days he's actually doing more with supercollider, which skips sheetmusic and goes right to sounds: https://supercollider.github.io/
I love lilypond as a programmer because I can use git. I have a private git repo that has lead sheets for all my favorite jazz standards (with my own reharms), notation at various levels for my originals, arrangements of songs for my a cappella friends, and a cue for a full film score project I did. The output quality is amazing, but the best part is I don't have to worry about forward/backward compatibility. None of my old Sibelius scores are openable anymore without spending hundreds on an upgrade, but all my lilypond scores will always be available to me.
I use it for the same reason, but also it is worlds ahead of Musescore if you want to put together a songbook (particularly if you also have tex experience). The best advice Musescore has for making a songbook with many scores is to use a PDF editor on the output.
Also as a programmer, Lilypond is programmable, and nearly infinitely customizable (similar to tex). I love that I can write some style information in a "header" and include it in every score. In my current project I am writing a lot of SATB choral songs in book format. But I also want to do a melody only edition. Just tweaking a header file, I can hide all the other voices, no problem.
(I also use Musescore, which I prefer for composition or simple projects. But when I want to output a large finished product, I always go back to Lilypond.)
This is good to know and technically correct. From a practical standpoint, text format is necessary but not sufficient for being usefully trackable in git. If you cannot efficiently diff and merge a format having the file in git gains you as little as having a binary file in git.
XML files are often of that kind, but not only. Many years ago I worked with a FORTRAN derived file format which from the outset should be ideal for git. In reality the files were several gigabytes and for most of them the ordering of the lines was insignificant[1]. Not only is git not particularly good with very large files (it certainly wasn't back then), diffing and merging files where several hundreds of millions of lines jump around arbitrarily is practically impossible.
[1] This was a deliberate design decision of the language. When it was conceived it was still usually punched on physical paper cards. One 80 character line used to be one punch card. Card decks sometimes fell to the ground and got all mixed up. A language that doesn't require a particular ordering of the cards (=lines) is kind of practical in real world scenarios. Of course millions of cards is not, so the point was kind of moot, but there we were.
I used to be big on LilyPond, but in the end I concluded that my musical brain works much more effortlessly when there's an actual graphical score in front of it. (Maybe I'd feel differently if I had one of those keyboardist/composer/jazz brains and/or perfect pitch.) Plug in a MIDI keyboard, learn the shortcuts, and input is fast enough in MuseScore.
There's definitely room for something that bridges the advantages of the different approaches, but it's a difficult problem and it's a $0 billion market, so having passionate people make MuseScore better is probably the best path forward.
LilyPond is incredible for the one purpose it's built for: engraving notated music. But music engraving is the usually the very last step of a compositional or editorial process. As such, other methods, even pen and paper, may well be superior tools for the creative process of composition (although we should also remember the testimony of Bach's sons that the elder Bach always composed away from the keyboard, and regarded the inability to compose without an instrument at hand to be evidence of poverty of invention; of course, this does not rule out the possibility that Bach tested out out his draft compositions on a keyboard).
On the editorial side, LilyPond is an incredible tool for creating modern editions of earlier music, specifically music in mensural notation. It comes with common glyphs and has full ligature support, and the separation of content and presentation means that one can reproduce the look of early manuscripts and prints while generating a modern score from the same source file. This has been really great at reducing transcription errors by easing the mental burden of transcription, transposition and note reduction, which can all be handled automatically by LilyPond. It's not perfect, but miles ahead of any alternative.
> elder Bach always composed away from the keyboard, and regarded the inability to compose without an instrument at hand to be evidence of poverty of invention
What older people on the extreme of some skill think about the skill is not necessarily applicable to 99.9% of us.
It requires a tablet and pencil/stylus, and it’s a bit pricey. But I’ve found the handwritten interface, once I got used to it, to be fairly intuitive.
Yes. You can both write notes for percussion instruments on a staff and apply preset drum patterns and fills. I don’t compose with percussion myself, and I don’t know how the drums and percussion in StaffPad might compare with other programs.
My still-early impression of StaffPad is that it is best for writing scores in a traditional, classical-like format, and detailed knowledge of standard music notation seems to be necessary. It might not be suitable for people who are more comfortable composing with keyboards, rhythm machines, digital audio workstations, etc.
I learned how to write music 50 years ago on paper. Compared to that, this software is a huge advance. Being able to edit scores easily and hear what I write played back is wonderful.
I agree with you that a graphical interface works better. All existing sheet music follow this same format. It seems strange that some are trying to go in a vastly different text based approach.
I’m a beginner pianist, and I’ve been writing down stuff in ABC notation[1] using Obsidian[2] and a plugin[3] for instant previews. I was already using Obsidian for all of my plain-text Markdown notes, so it was the obvious choice for me. Obsidian also has a nice WYSIWYG-preserving PDF export feature in case I need some printed sheets. :)
ABC is easier to learn but also not feature rich. ABC vs Lilypond is similar to asciiMath vs MathJax in this aspect. You'll soon find its limitation and needs more.
(But Lilypond is hard, harder than writing documents in LaTeX for example.)
I'd been trying to find a way to "write" the music in a way more similar to how I think about it.
from this pursuit, I've come to realize that "sheet music" is just the only technologically available way to store the music back in the day. a practice which had an entire publishing and printing industry around it; this is how composers in the 19th century made money
BUT THEN, sound recording technology made that be somewhat obsolete, and then synthesizers and computers came and made music writing notation be less and less capable of keeping up the pace of musical technology innovation.
all in all, I'm considering that what if I say that PCM is a writing and start 'handing down music' directly as 0s and 1s in at a 16 bit depth (two bytes per sample) at a 44100 samples per second?
then again that's cumbersome, so the super collider code (and everything needed to run it) IS now the 'music notation' which includes a description of the instrument as well as the song/the music. (traditional written sheet music notation does not really include a description of the instrument beyond a reference by name)
this also "turns" the music interpreter into a digital to analog converter. lol
A composition, to varying degrees depending on the composer, leaves various degrees of freedom for the performance. So the PCM encoding of a performance is entirely different to the composition ... conceptually.
However, a good musician may be able to listen to the PCM encoding (aka "digital audio") and from that frame their own understanding of the composition, thus leading to a new performance.
so PCM would be like the piece of paper without the musical staves? (to draw a direct analogy)
I am interested in music in contrast with the broader "sound art"; then again I don't even know what the heck this 'difference' between these even means
CSound is akin to a badly written assembly language for audio synthesis and processing.
SuperCollider (or more precisely, SClang) is more like Lisp for audio synthesis and processing.
One important difference is that the designer of SClang understand roughly 1000% more about programming languages than the designer of CSound (who was a visionary person, but who really didn't understand programming languages).
A good friend of mine used to be a core developer there. He started by nagging them about the horizontal alignment of notes in different instruments/voices and that blossomed to over a year of collaboration.
It's very much like with kerning - once you see a sheet with decent alignment, you can't unsee it.
When you say he wrote an opera using LilyPond in vim, do you mean to say that his setup for composing was a vim terminal? Or did he write a draft first on some other medium such as paper and then inputted that into vim?
If anyone is yet to see it, Tantacrul (on youtube) is now deeply involved with MuseScore (UX lead or similar?); he put out an awesome vid on the design of MS4 at the beginning of the year: https://youtu.be/Qct6LKbneKQ
His video on how Sibelius' UX is a pile of shit remains one of my favourite vids on yt: https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI
Weirdly I checked his channel yesterday (for the first time since many months) if there happens to be a new video! Didn't know that there will be a new Musescore release.
Out of curiosity, what ever happened to all of the drama with MuseScore, locking downloads behind a subscription, the Audacity acquisition + telemetry debacle? It looks like Tenacity still exists in some form, though it does not appear like there is a ton of significant activity on it in the last month or so.
While I don't know about the OSS community's stance, I can say that most casual users have embraced the new version of MuseScore. They added a lot of important features with the latest version, and I think most people don't really care about the telemetry.
I think some of this might be avoidable by downloading Musescore separately from the larger package they've promoting now and not using some features? That's what I do, anyhow.
Note, this would not be the first open source music app to lock downloads behind paywall, e.g. Ardour is known for it: https://community.ardour.org/download
MuseScore desktop (the composition / notation app) has never been behind a paywall. This is a mixup with the mobile application which is a sheet music viewer that features copyrighted scores.
You can get it without charge from just about any and every Linux distribution.
You can get the source code without charge from ardour.org/download (or from our mirror repo on github).
You can get it (legally) without charge from anybody else who already has it.
The only thing you cannot do is to get a ready-to-run binary without charge from ardour.org itself. You can opt to pay as little as US$1 for that, however.
In my world, a paywall is something that stops you from getting access to something without paying for it.
The Ardour "paywall" does not do that.
You may not like the "cost" of the alternative (e.g. finding someone else who already has the Windows version, or learning to build it yourself, or getting someone else to build it for you), but those costs are, I would claim, not part of the "paywall".
If you had said "ardour.org doesn't offer ready-to-run binaries unless you pay something for them", I would not even have commented.
You're saying "oh, well, they don't provide no-charge downloads, so it's paywalled" is a comment that to me basically ignores what makes libre software libre software.
If looks like you're not considering a resource to be behind a paywall if there's a way to get it via other means, without paying.
I'd say the opposite is true, you can put content behind a paywall in one place, even if it is freely (libre and/or gratis) available elsewhere. Wikipedia has a page called "List of public domain resources behind a paywall" [1], this seems a nice example. To me Ardour binaries are another.
You are walking down a road in a small town. On the left, one of the residents, is selling freshly cut sunflowers for $2.99 a bunch. You ask them if you can have a bunch for free, and they say no. You keep walking. A few blocks up ahead, you come across another resident who has put a bucket of cut sunflowers in front of the their yard, free for the taking.
Are the sunflowers "behind a paywall" in any functional sense? Does the fact that one possible place to get them requires payment mean anything when they are available at no cost elsewhere?
In my view the sunflowers are behind a paywall at that particular place on the left.
The functional sense seems very relative. For people who cannot go further, all sunflowers are behind a paywall. For people who can, it’s just that, i.e. they also have access to sunflowers not behind a paywall.
To be clear, I’d say the resident on the left (or Ardour for that matter) is in no way worse because they’re offering paid sunflowers. They have every right to do so. And something must be good about their offer if people are buying from them (location, authority, desire to support their business, perhaps all of the above).
You get a 70 MB "Ardour*.run" file that is a bash script that contains setup instructions followed by raw binary code. And you good the feeling of knowing that you've supporting a great open source project.
Also note that only a few linux distros are bleeding-edge (such as Arch-Linux, which will contain binaries for newly released package versions pretty quickly). But if you are on a non-bleeding edge linux distro, your distro's repos aren't kept up-to-date and so the advantage of the Ardour binary download is you get an up-to-date package without having to install a 3rd-party repo or build it yourself.
Yep, our packages install in parallel with each other (and with repo versions too), so you can keep older versions around.
And we aim to release every 2 months.
People who pay monthly also get access to nightly builds, allowing them to test things out before release (useful for us, sometimes useful for them). Most of our alpha/beta testers, however, build it themselves, from source.
I believe it was the sheet music that was paywalled, not the software. That was a bit concerning since as far as I know a large portion of it was UGC and some of it even public domain, so it was weird to ask for a subscription payment for it. At this point though, it does look like they have made some amends, though I'm not sure if everyone's satisfied. Doesn't seem to matter too much in the grand scheme of things, overall, though it was an unfortunate situation to watch unfold even as an outsider.
Note: Linux distros still provide free downloads for Ardour, and Ardour's source code is free for anyone to build. Ardour's official binary builds are what is behind a paywall.
Also the "locking downloads behind a paywall" only applies to scores that users have uploaded to musical score social media sharing site musescore.com, but the desktop program MuseScore binaries are available for free on Win, Mac, Linux, BSDs via https://musescore.org/en/download. You can anyway post your scores anywhere for free. And there may be proprietary VSTs that you can pay to download via MuseHub, but MuseScore's baseline audio synthesis (as well as any free soundfonts you can freely download) are free.
MuseScore is one of those rare open source projects where it’s obvious that a serious amount of thought has been put into the user experience. I only dabble in engraving, but every time I’ve tried to do something more complex the UI has been ready and waiting to help me accomplish it.
Arguably WYSIWYG engraving software only exists to provide a workable user experience (vs editing lilypond or god forbid musicxml notation in a text editor).
Having worked a fair bit on it and as a regular user of it I'm only too aware of areas still in desperate need of a better UI/UX though. Still hope to go back to contributing more regularly at some point, though I didn't especially enjoy having to regularly deal with the foibles of a large complex C++ code base and digging into the internals of Qt to figure out weird UI bugs.
Musescore the company is a disaster. They took my money for a Pro subscription, without delivering the actual benefits. Their support organization is, as far as I can tell, nonexistent. After six months of trying, I have yet to find a way to get them to respond to my request for support.
Sounds like it's time to call them out (politely) on twitter with a tentacrul at-mentioned. That at least seems to get their attention. Unless you already did that in a non-polite fashion and got muted, of course.
Still using MuseScore 3. Even without the new sounds packs enabled, the latency typing notes on a (computer) keyboard is still too high. I would rather be stuck with the old version then deal with the unsettling 100-200ms lag for every input. It's quite an unfortunate trend that so many modern applications are neglecting basic UI responsiveness.
I've been heavily using MuseScore 4 lately and haven't noticed that type of latency on the Linux AppImage. My only gripe with 4 is the inability to open multiple scores in tabs. It opens them in separate windows instead. It makes closing scores in that situation difficult. If you have two open windows and quit one of them, both quit. If you instead just close one of the scores the window remains open with nothing in it. It seems to be a can't/won't fix problem as it has to do with their new soundpack system. It's probably the number one gripe users have with 4.
I think with 4.0 release, they were more focus on getting engraving more correct (among other big changes like the new sound system), and that resulted in a performance hit, but the 4.1 patch notes specifically say there are significant performance improvements, so it would be worth it to try it out again.
The audio driver still matters, though. If you're on Windows rather than a Mac, not using ASIO will always incur a truly incredible latency, even with real MIDI devices. Mac's Core Audio is quite a bit better in that respect, but pretty much everything ships with Asio4All for Windows users, and it's still an excellent idea to use it if you don't have an ASIO audio interface.
Actually, WASAPI can deliver quite low latencies (<10ms) and it can also operate in shared mode, so I would always prefer it over ASIO4all when using the built-in soundcard.
I found the app to be incredibly well-featured but ridiculously unintuitive. Nothing worked the way I wanted to and I spent half my time fighting it when trying to insert notes and such.
I have no background in authoring sheet music so my sense is that this is just me and my whole mental model is probably wrong.
Did anyone else experience this? Or did anyone else find it to be the opposite: super intuitive and smooth?
I hear if you create a 40 minute youtube video on how bad the UI is, with a bit of humour mixed in, but mostly valid criticism, they hire you as a product manager.
>I have no background in authoring sheet music so my sense is that this is just me and my whole mental model is probably wrong.
Probably, if you mean 4+ which is significantly intuitive with certain big changes. 3 and earlier was a lot more unituitive.
Note that all the industry-standard alternatives (except the relative newcomer Dorico) are much much less intuitive, and not because of the domain complexity of sheet music, but because of bad UI.
I've used it to make proper sheet music out of tabs people post on Ultimate Guitar. It was a slog to get started, but I suspect that is because of the wide range of symbols etc I needed to use. Once I had a sense for how to find things — after transcribing about a page of music — it was smooth sailing. I'd never written sheet music before using MuseScore 4.
The number of different things that different people want to do for different audiences with music that goes through a computer somewhere along the way is so great that we must admire the people who have put MuseScore together for producing any progress at all on a path that might be hoped to deliver all things for all people eventually, and all who have tried it, as I, ought to thank them for sharing it. If you find it useful, use it. If you find it somewhat useful, use it somewhat, as I do. If you find it almost useful, adapt if you can, but be patient if you decide to wait for, or persuade, the developers to deliver what will work for you. The problem space addressed is so huge, so many different kinds of sounds, scales, instruments, notations, markups, styles, media and formats, performance spaces, input devices and playback systems, personal preferences, human factors, human languages, ...
As a fairly casual user, I absolutely love Musescore. Still takes a bit of getting used to entering notes if I haven't used it for a while, but I am amazed that there is a free app for sheet music notation, where I would normally be locked into a paid option. The choice to upload to the cloud and play in browser is awesome for sharing. Can't wait to see more updates :)
Musescore has most frequent, I'd say spammy and aggressive, email announcements I ever got. For unsubscribe I had to make exception in NextDNS for their tracker in unsubscribe site.
The only party to blame for SEO is Google. Everyone else is just playing catchup to however they decided to rank pages this week. There are other search engines, of course. And no, don't stop using Google, but also start using the alternatives. Just using one search engine is doing yourself a disservice.
How is it free? When I try to download one of those scores, it tells me I have to subscribe. And "try for free". Why? What is that? They don't mention a price, but it strongly suggests I have to pay sooner or later. That's not free.
Plus, they have a ton of non-PD scores for which they don't pay licenses. They just grab the money.
Not the linked page (which doesn't say what the product is, which is why I went looking for the home page). Both have a video, but only the home page autoplays.
My dad wrote an opera using LilyPond in vim, though I believe these days he's actually doing more with supercollider, which skips sheetmusic and goes right to sounds: https://supercollider.github.io/