comments about MuseScore -- good and not so good -- at a major piano discussion board (Piano World.com)
MuseScore was mentioned in a current thread at the Piano World website:
"music notation software - for practical value and for fun!"
Some questions were raised about MuseScore, specifically in comparison to its commercial competitors.
Some answers have included claims that may or may not be accurate or would benefit from clarification.
One of the reasons I'm mentioning this is that Piano World is a very active discussion forum with an enormous volume of readership traffic worldwide. Accurate information would be good publicity for MuseScore, while erroneous claims that go unrefuted could be detrimental.
You have to be a member to post at Piano World, but registration is free.
Comments
There's not a lot in that discussion thread, but most of the points raised about MS were valid. I also noticed the lack of font quality when zooming in on scores. However it is terribly unfair to compare a program that is developed on peoples free time to that of pro companies that charge big $$$ yearly and have been around for many more years. If some people expect perfection from something free then I'm afraid they will always be disappointed.
I for one love MS and enjoy using it, even when finding bugs as I know they will be fixed, sometimes very quickly. Try that with Finale. Being a part of this very active community is wonderful!
In reply to Not a lot of detail by schepers
I thought it was kind of funny that Finale and Sibelius were held up as examples of programs that look better when zooming in than MuseScore, because whatever subtle differences might exist between these three, they *all* pale in comparison to Lilypond in this respect. Not that I think this is a particularly important point - the print quality from all four are more than good enough for virtually all purposes.
But yeah, overall, it looks like a pretty reasonably discussion, considering it really doesn't get into much detail.
In reply to I thought it was kind of by Marc Sabatella
Could someone comment further about what was said about fonts and that thing of where something doesn't look quite right when zoomed in all the way? It's something about the way things are 'joined', IIRC, like stems and beams maybe?
FWIW I've read some posts on this forum, too, complaining about shapes and alignments and the need for a 'parallelogram' tool -- or something like that.
It's all over my head, but I'd like to learn more because it comes as a surprise to me.
I grew up obsessed with musical notation and the traditional engraving practices in classical piano scores, and I think I have a pretty good eye for this sort of stuff. And I've seen some frankly horrible looking re-typesets of classical scores on occasion in which aesthetics were non-existent. Now I don't know whether that's the fault of the program or the person using it, but I've been able to create some beautiful work in MuseScore -- stuff that most people couldn't tell wasn't hand-engraved 100 years ago ... unless, apparently, they were zoomed in at 1600%.
And who would actually care about something so microscopic?
I have never used either Finale or Sibelius, so I have no basis to compare among the programs. And while I agree that the conversation at Piano World was reasonable and comments about MuseScore were generally positive, it still didn't seem quite to be getting the fair shake -- and accolades! -- it deserves.
I think that on a deep-seated level many people don't trust -- or reflexively dislike -- things that are free. As Thomas Paine said, "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly."
And another thing -- the gratuitous comparisons between MS Office and Open Office seemed to come out of nowhere and proved nothing. Would somebody actually claim, "Hey, I think MS Office has a much prettier interface than Open Office, so Sibelius and Finale must therefore be superior to MuseScore"? It's just weird!
In reply to Could someone comment further by [DELETED] 448831
"Could someone comment further about what was said about fonts and that thing of where something doesn't look quite right when zoomed in all the way?"
The thing they're talking about is the relative position of stuff like note heads and stems. In MuseScore, you can click and drag the stem around a little, and sometimes its default original position is just a tiny bit wrong. Who cares? The only times I've seen an error big enough to be worth zooming in and fixing are on things where I had to move note heads because multiple voices were overwriting each other.
At actual playing speed, I can't imagine that anybody would have time to notice this....
-- J.S.
I just quickly read the article at pianoworld.com, and the review actually looked quite favorable. That musescore is mentioned in comparison with commercial (expensive) products is a real plus. So, I feel that the article will send more people to musescore.
Plus there's one practical consideration that many are overlooking. We live in economically "difficult" times and very many people will not have the funds to pay for expensive software. What about people living in poorer countries? The bottom line is that musescore is in a good position to attract MANY people.
Thanks for a most excellent product and user community.
I find that the sound quality and instrument choices are very good, and I am pleased with MuseScore so far, but when trying to change the time signature from 3/4 time to 12/8 to create a new part to the song, it produced incorrect blank rests, a rest before the new time signature, and scribbled the notes I had put into the new 12/8 section. This appears to be a glitch that has prevented me from completing my composition. Please slove this issue.
Thank you,
NHardwick
In reply to Time signature issues by NHardwick
Describing the issue in more detail would be good. Posting a score showing where and how to expose the bug would also be good. If you mean that you dropped a 12/8 onto an existing 3/4 section and each measure had extra rests padding the end, that's normal behaviour.
In reply to Time signature issues by NHardwick
Hi.
Generally each thread is about a specific situation - this one about comparisons.
You question may not receive the attention it deserves because of where your posted it.
This should be raised in the appropriate forum (bugs and help).
In reply to Time signature issues by NHardwick
It sounds to me as though you've hit on the phantom score corruption bug.
This has been known about for a while, but no-one has ever managed to discover the exact steps to reproduce it so it remains unfixed at the moment.
In order to get maximum help on this (corrupted scores can be fixed) it would be better to open a thread in the Support and bug report forum.
HTH
Michael