Unable to activate Muse Sounds

• Jun 4, 2024 - 20:26

I have a problem with Muse Sounds for Linux. I've just started a MuseScore Pro+ subscription and hit this problem right away, Ive now spent hours and days trying to find a solution on MuseScore and the communities and all I have gained is a headache, because after looking into the problem I'm about to raise a discussion for, I happened to run the UI check for the Muse Sampler and it returns the error "Muse Sampler Library not found!" and on checking the logs where there are lots of errors, perhaps mostly not significant and not show stoppers, but an error in the log confirms MuseScore cannot find its own library, specifically the Muse Sampler (LibMuseSamplerCoreLib.so).

I spent most of my career in the software engineering lifecycle where I spent most of the time analysing and solving software problems and in also in quality assurance ensuring that the GUI interface of all software products and underlying functions worked as per the specifications and were as logical, simple and straightforward and intuitive as possible and in the case of MuseScore that seems to be generally the case and its an amazing feat of software engineering since it makes what is an incredibly complex subject relatively easy and intuitive and I've found I can use most features with ease and MuseScore is evidently a soundly engineered and well rounded product, except for this issue, which at first glance looks like it would be a pretty simple and straightforward task, but the problem I have encountered is that after having selected the playback setup for a score, there are 2 options for what MuseScore calls Sound Fonts, the first option is MS Basic which is the default option as expected and thats all fine, then there is the Muse Sounds which is an absolute must add-on for me, but which out of the box is unavailable and ghosted out and the end user cannot simply enable/activate this from the UI themselves and after research I found that MuseScore4 doesnt have a built-in feature to perform this function, but instead the onus is placed on the end user to download a separate application, namely Muse Sounds Manager (Linux) Muse Hub elsewhere and all it does is downloads the additional Muse Sounds the user chooses and saves them to a default location, which I found after running tests, takes way longer than necessary to download compared to all other downloads on my system of the same size and it seems that MuseScore4 and Muse Sounds are unaware of each others existence, because in practise, MuseScore4 appears to be unaware that Muse Sounds Manager is installed and whether it has any Muse Sound packages downloaded and available and likewise Muse Sounds is seemingly unware of whether MuseScore is installed or if it is, its certainly not aware of the location where MuseScore stores the additional Muse Sound Fonts, because if it did MuseScore would then enable the Muse Sounds options and make the sounds available wherever applicable in the UI, but it doesnt and so far Ive spent hours and days trying to find a solution and Ive seen the same issues raised several times on the previous version, for example see:

https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/15670

Which I appear to have precisely reproduced in MuseScore4.

Any assistance would be much appreciated.

In my humble opinion, having a separate Sounds Manager is overkill and all it appears to do is to add unecessary complexity to what should be a quick and simple task, when by far the most simple, logical and intuitive way of activating the Muse Sounds feature, would be to simply provide Muse Sounds in the form of a plugin, because the way the plugin feature works in MuseScore is so simple its a breeze andit seems odd that Muse Sounds is not simply a plugin.


Comments

First: you don't need to pay anything to use MuseScore.

What Linux distribution are you using?
Please attache a logfile from ~/.local/share/MuseScore/MuseScore4/logs/

On Linux, Muse Hub is deprecated. Instructions in the Github link above are not for Linux but for Mac.
First steps:
-download Muse Sounds Manager
-start it. This should download the library libMuseSamplerCoreLib.so and install it under ~/.local/share/MuseSampler/lib/libMuseSamplerCoreLib.so (it's been a while, i don't remember anymore what is being asked exactly, if anything). This is for Ubuntu. It might be different depending on the distro. You are not using root, are you?
Look at the logfile. Where is MuseScore looking for the Muse Sampler library?
You could look under ~/.muse-sounds-manager/ for downloads and logs and in Muse sounds Manager: "View application logs"
If MuseScore does not find the library (Diagnostics => Muse Sampler => Check Muse Sampler), it will not work.

There are seperate applications because MuseScore is Open Source, Muse Sampler/sounds is not.

In reply to by graffesmusic

Thanks for the swift and detailed reply.
Over the time Ive been trying to solve the issue, I tried many things, I initially installed and used Muse Sound Manager for Linux to download Muse Guitars Vol.1, but MuseScore for some unknown reason didnt detect it and enable the Muse Sounds option in the UI, I tried quiting and relaunching MuseScore, which didnt work, I restarted my pc and it still didnt work, I tried manually copying the downloaded Sound Font from the Muse Sounds Manager directory into the MuseScore Sound Fonts directory and MuseScore still didnt detect it, again I tried restarting the app and my pc and still nothing changed, I thought perhaps it was a problem with the Sound Font itself and so I thought I would download another called "Keys" and although I cannot now see the Keys Sound Font in the MuseScore UI, somehow to my surprise, I can now See Guitars Vol 1 and the MuseScore UI is finally recognising it and has now activated Muse Sounds everywhere in the UI and I ran the UI Check again and it reports the Muse sampler library is now detected and is currently version 0.6.3.

So I can only assume that while I left Muse Sounds Manager downloading the Keys Sound Font, I also left the MuseScore app open, so perhaps MuseScore detected it was now online and did something of its own accord, in the background, because I'm not convinced it was triggered by the action of downloading the additional Keys Sounds that prompted any changes because it didnt automatically appear in the MuseScore UI and nor does it appear to have been a result of anything I did, except perhaps copying the Guitar Vol 1 sound font over into the MiseScore Sound Fonts directory which is likely not in the correct directory, since I have no idea what the structure of that directory needs to be, because I first tried copying it preserving the exact same directory structure from Muse Sounds Manager, but since that didnt work I then copied the sound font directly into the MuseScore Sound Fonts folder, so its anybody's guess, which of these things triggered the MuseScore UI changes.

Anyway somehow the issues are almost resolved, I just have to figure out how and clean up any mess I may have made to MuseScores directory structure and the only issue left outstanding is that Muse Sounds Manager still doesnt seem to put the Sound Fonts into the correct location that MuseScore expects or at least thats what the problem seems to be.

In reply to by Timeisonloan

The MuseScore4/SoundFonts directory is only for soundfonts "sf2/sf3". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundFont
Any soundfont you put in there can be selected in the mixer under "Soundfonts".
The "Muse Sounds" location can be defined in "Muse Sounds Manager" config. IMHO, it is best to just use default location, but any other accessible directory will do if disk space is a problem.
Muse Sounds can be selected in the mixer under 'muse Sounds"....
You have the latest sampler version 0.6.3.

In reply to by graffesmusic

Thanks for all the useful info, it definately wasnt due to lack of disk space using the Muse Sounds Manager's default Sound install location. I used the native package manager to install fhe MSM and it seems more probable that it was a problem with permissions for the default location.

In reply to by Timeisonloan

I found that after I had specified a Custom Sounds Install Location in Muse Sounds Manager that it has now saved both Sound Fonts in a location where MuseScore can see them, the directory it created is now named "Muse Hub Downloads" which incidentally it didnt create when using its default location at:

"/home/username/muse-sounds-manager/downloads"

When I specified the Custom location /../music/musescore4/ the subdirectory structure I can see is Muse Hub Downloads/
-Installers
(which now contains musesampler-linux-0.6.3.196.tar.zip which it evidently installed and which didn't exist when MSM used its default location!)
-Instruments
-Muse Guitars Vol 1
-Muse Keys

So MuseScore is clearly now picking the Sound Fonts up from that location and not from the Sound Fonts path I have specified in MuseScore, where I had manually copied Guitar Vol 1 and evidently I was mistaken when I thought MuseScore had found the first Sound Font in that location, but as a result of the custom Sounds install location I made in Muse Sounds Manager, I can now confirm that all of the issues I reported were resolved and all of the issues it seems were caused by the Muse Sounds Manager's default "Sound install location", perhaps it couldnt write to its default location for some reason and it had to write the data to some alternative which was somewhere MuseScore couldnt access them.

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