Musescore 4 design and concept proposal

It is great to see the scoreview being maximized. However, what about the Inspector? It's a great deal for adjusting appearance (and also playback) along the way.

You seem to have spent a great amount of time on this, hopefuly at least some of your ideas will find their place in MuseScore

Erk… modes make things harder to use in general, think vi. This won’t help.

Also, consider my 1024x600 px EeePC on which I need to be able to use MuseScore (although I normally do it on an 1024x768 px ThinkPad) before doing any UI concept work.

I'd start by challenging your basic idea:

In everyday life, composing and writing music goes something like this:
1.finding ideas (often on the instrument - mostly on the piano)
2. specify instruments/singer
3. write down and record the idea
4. design and print out sheet music and give it to the musicians/singers
5. play/singing together and adjust tempo and volume here and there if necessary
I would like to see Musescore in that order. In the software, steps 3 and 4 would have to be swapped, because giving out notes is the last step on the PC and I want to listen to my voices before.

For me the order is either: 1, 3, 5, 2, 1, 3, 2, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4 for composing or 2, 4(,5) for transcribing. So forcing mode/workflows during that sounds hampering and restrictive. I'd be curious to find out how much this design would indeed feel like a hassle for switching between modes. If switching between them comes off easy (for example adding/changing instruments is now often only a single keypress away (I)) then it probably won't have that much of an effect in reality.

MuseScore Window
Giving as much room to the ScoreView as possible could make sense, but to me it often doesn't matter that much. I easily zoom between overview and point editing. When working with a piece I hardly every need to get a good overview of my score during editing it. What I do need then is an easy way to add the stuff I need with minimal interaction.
Where I do need the ScoreView is when reviewing what has been written, which is often done in combination with playback. So I do see a lot of value in some kind of more playback oriented viewport/mode, where editing is prohibited (always nice during practicing as well) and ScoreView is maximized.

Having the toolbar merged into the window decoration is something I'm almost allergic to. Hiding the basic menu behind a button is one of the biggest grievances I have with the current office suite. In addition I'm very hesitant to see how this plays out cross-platform and with different window managers.
Mac users expect that menu to be there in their system bar, for example.
If you want to save vertical space, then integrate the basic menu into the window decoration if you really have to; which is still somewhat supported on some systems and breaks less with how a normal application works; including how keyboard focus works.
I'd hate for your basic menu to pop up every time I press the Alt key, just to enable it to show the menu accessors (unless those are now all an extra step away as you now force me to first open the basic menu).
As an acceptable example, I refer to the Vivaldi implementation (where integrating this menu into the window decorator is a UI option):

Palettes
This seems a logical step up from how they currently already work. Although here I'm curious as to how you see keyboard accessibility working here. Blind users can't drag-and-drop easily.

I like the minimized bar for the palettes, getting clear icons for each palette (and allowing us to select those for custom palettes as well) is extremely important here. I think you did a great job in the current proposal.

Piano
I think duplicating/integrating the notation toolbar with the piano makes a lot of sense.

Playback Mode
As briefly mentioned above, this term seems to mean something different to me. I would use a playback mode for practicing, as it should prevent me from editing the notation on the score. For that purpose I'd also find maximizing the ScoreView here is of the utmost importance!

Similarly I hardly ever touch the synthesizer settings after an initial setup, so easily hiding of those is a natural workflow to me.

A transport bar is a must, both as reference as well as a scrubbing tool.

Mixer
The above being said, I do like the mixer design. When I'd open the mixer in playback mode I'd indeed start off with the full mixer, and then quickly switch to just the volume faders or hide it completely for the rest of the session.
One thing I'm entirely missing in many of these controls (and I get mimicking a real console, I really do) is absolute values/settings. Even my cheap PreSonus has the ability to copy over settings from one channel to another to ensure the volume faders or the panning settings are identical.

How can I set the same exact volume/reverb to multiple instruments? Is there somewhere I can type in a value?

What seems to be missing (or is less clear) in the current design are the sub-channels for an instrument. How are these handled?

Print/Save/Share
I love the main overview for printing, allowing to select the number of copies of each part.

I'm unsure how many of the other printing options we can integrate. Again here, being cross-platform and having to deal with many different printer drivers, this is currently offloaded to the operating system print dialog. Unsure how feasible these options are.
(Color vs Black/White vs Grayscale could perhaps still be handled within MuseScore by changing the document sent through, other options likely less so).

I'm completely confused by the difference between Save Online and Publish. Also note that the current save online dialog is not part of the MuseScore software. It is a minimized browser showing the musescore.com upload form.
I'd hate for MuseScore to have to push out updates simply because things at the sister platform musescore.com have changed.

So far I don't see an added value for making this a "mode" over the current dialogs existing for these actions.

And a final concern is also uttered by mirabilos on the required resolution for some options. (The current 3.4.2 mixer is in that respect a complete failure compared to the previous one already, I think yours is a small improvement in that area). Especially being aware of the Windows scaling options which for many laptop users default to a 125/150% magnification which Qt/MuseScore currently has proven to not work well with.

This is dark mode. What about light?

This is a really great bit of work and we're poring through it all now.

Thanks very very much!

Really nice ideas here!
I don't like so much the colours but the concept is really interesting.

http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/3NZ1OX8Hp7J
Discuss here also.

Seems Like a really well update/proposal, Will there be any more instruments and soundfonts added? I am a percussionist and I would appreciate a gong to sound like a gong, rather than a conga, going for mdl too, their sounds are too high pitched (snare's fine ig).

Ok so I am a new user and, admittedly, have not yet read the user's manual. I have tried Musescore before and gave it up because of how unintuitive it seemed to me. So, after having tried a number of other music notation software (Overture, Notion, ScoreCloud, Crescendo, Forte, Music Jotter), I came back to it because neither one of those programmes are suitable to my needs, even if some of those were a lot more intuitive. I mean, I should be able to find (and place in the beginning of the score!) a stave bracket without reading the user's manual, and the selection tool should be right there on the inspector bar. The function for adding new instruments should not be hidden under "edit", but in "tools", at least, if not on the inspector. And changing the name of the instrument (say, from Alto to Alto 2) should be possible when adding/selecting said instrument. So YES, I agree with the initial statement about how writing music should look like. The current Musescore does not look like that - and I've been reading and playing music since I was 7. I realise this is an open source software, and while I appreciate the effort of the person who initiated this thread, I think the only way to improve it is to rewrite the entire software from scratch. I personally see no change from the last time I tried it (before Tantacrul) to today's "post-Tantactul era", so I suppose most of his suggestions were not implemented. I have watched his video about this software and agreed with him. The workflow however is just as complicated now and I am just as frustrated as he was in the above-mentioned video. Oh, to be a software engineer instead of a musician!...
PS: Sorry I've hijacked the thread, it was just one of the most recent and so with more chances to be read.

It would be fantastic if you could make the piano color match boomwhacker colors. Or at least the possibility of editing the colors.

Could you make the left bar opaque?
Thanks.

when will this be thought to arrive?

That modes idea seems a lot like Dorico.

That's an amazing presentation! May I know how you made those designs? Perhaps my question is pointless if you made them with a Windows software: I am a Linux User.