Why is MuseScore not a 'professional' program?

I'm told the key difference is real-time MIDI input—i.e., you can plug in a MIDI keyboard and just play something on it, and it will instantaneously generate the sheet music. Beyond that, there's pretty much a 99% overlap in features.

I compose arrange music professionally, and I also teach at universities and have worked as an editor for some major publications, and I have very many colleagues who do the same. I feel quite safe in saying that there is no simple answer to a question like this, but I can give some observations based on the where things stand today (which is a very different place than where things stood five years ago when this thread was started!)

First, real time MIDI input is a feature valued by some people, of course, but it's not really a differentiator for most. Most people - professionals included - find other note input methods equally or more efficient. So that's a red herring, even if one or two people on this forum happen to be among the small minority who find it to be a deal breaker.

When this thread was started in 2011, MuseScore was lacking a number of *other* features that many professionals *would* consider very important, however. Probably the single biggest was linked parts, which Sibelius had had for many years, and Finale had recently added as of a few years before this thread started. Of course, FInale had not had this feature for the first decade+ of its existence and yet it was still considered the top "professional" program, so like any other feature, it is more of a "high want" than a "need", but once people became accustomed to it in MuseScore, they definitely missed it in MuseScore. So it became the almost unquestioned #1 missing feature, but since the release of 2.0 last year, MuseScore now supports this.

Other features that were missing at the time but have been added since include tablature for guitar & other stringed instruments and various other notation features needed for jazz or pop or Renaissance music or some 20th/21st century music, etc. There were also some limitations in the ability to make large scale edits to a score - applying text styling globally, ways of making large-scale selections and performing operations on them, etc - that professionals often found irksome, and great strides have been made over the past five years here as well. Similarly, the default positioning of many elements was less than ideal and less customizable than many wanted, thus requiring more manual adjustment than people who produce large amounts of notated music or need it to look as professional as possible would prefer, and again, the current version is much improved in this respect over what was the case in 2011.

Based on many conversations with other professional composers / arrangers / editors, I think there can be no question that MuseScore *is* now as "professional" as any other notation program, although of course as with any software, there is still room for improvement, and still a small handful of specific areas where one might need to use Finale or Sibelius instead.

Some of the areas that I and other professionals have identified as areas that could still use work to make it even better include:

- Performance when handling with large scores. MuseScore does get quite slow with scores of hundreds of measures, dozens of parts, etc. To the point where each click might take several seconds to take effect.

- Text handling could still be improved, especially with respect to lyrics. It's more cumbersome than it should be to create scores with lyrics both above and below the staff (the norm in many choral contexts), or to work with lyrics on more than a one-at-a-time basis. Educators and editors also value ways of attaching markings to scores that are not necessarily part of the final score (eg, comments).

- Page layout is more powerful and flexible than five years ago, but still could stand more improvement - ability to have different margins or staff spacing on different pages, attach markings

- While the actual quality of the scores produced now clearly rivals Finale and Sibelius in their current versions, those progreams continue to improve, and as new programs arrive that do even better still, we do need to continue to improve the quality of our output. The differences are the sort of things the average person might never notice, but if you are producing scores for publication, these details can matter.

That's my take, anyhow, as a professional user of quite a number of other programs for over a quarter of a century now.

No one ever said *some* professionals don't value real time input. *Some* clearly do. But others clearly don't. So you simply cannot say it is "not a professional program" because it lacks a feature that only a subset of professionals need.

Very many of the professionals I know simply don't use real time time entry with other programs, because it doesn't suit their workflow. Either they do a lot of their composing while away from a MIDI keyboard, or they are composing on the fly and simply don't have a pre-composed line to just play in, or they are writing music of sufficient complexity that automatic notation of the rhythms and accidentals would likely require more work to fix than to simply enter in the first place, or - as is the case for most of my colleagues - *all* of these statements are true, making real time MIDI input completely useless for them. For people like this - and we are talking many thousands of professionals here - the presence or absence of real time MIDI input is a non-issue, and thus whether a program has it or not has *no bearing* on their work or their consideration of what constitutes a "professional" program. I get that *you* value it greatly, but don't assume that this means *all* or even *most* professionals do.

As for the rest palette, I don't "defend" ithe decision, I just question why something that takes all of 15 seconds to learn seems like such a big deal to you. Most professionals enter notes and rests using keyboard shortcuts, as this is far more efficient than clicking with a mouse. So a separate rest palette would never be used even if it existed. For the vast majority of professionals, I assure you this is a non-issue, because they already enter notes and rests the msot efficient way: usng keybaord shortcuts. Not that a separate palette wouldn't be nice for *beginners*. And sure, educators might be happier if they didn't have to spend those extra 15 seconds explaining this feature. But I can't imagine anyone being so shortsighted that they would consider those 15 secondas a deal breaker when you consider the many many many many other advantages.

As for documentation, the free documentation is what it is - as you say, not much worse than the single most professional program ever produced. So I don't see how that disqualifies it as being "professional", But in any case, someone who requires more documentation is welcome to buy my book.