Transcribing a tricky score - Musescore 2.0.3 to the test

I must start by saying that I’m not actually a Musescore user. The program that I mainly use to write music is Sibelius, which I have been using since 2001. However, I've always had a lot of interest in new music notation software and I have been paying attention to Musescore’s development since its first version, when it was a program only available on Linux platforms. I doubt that I would switch to Musescore (unless Sibelius is discontinued). Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way affiliated with Avid and Musescore is a wonderful program, capable of doing almost everything I can do in Sibelius, but the many features that have been automated in Sibelius allow me to work faster and with much more ease than Musescore.

Having said that, let me say that what Musescore’s developers have accomplished is outstanding. The first music notation software that I used was not Sibelius but Encore (it’s still around, surprisingly) and you wouldn’t believe all the things I could not do back then. Something as simple as making more space between two staves was impossible and dynamic parts was a futuristic dream (that eventually came true, thank goodness!).

As I said above, I have a keen interest on new programs and I like to toy around with them, especially if they are open source, like Musescore and Lilypond (which I have also used). Therefore, two weeks ago I decided to put Musescore to the test and transcribe an old composition, which I wrote in 2004, and see what the program was capable of. The music is pretty straightforward in its style; what I mean is that it's easy to grasp. The themes and sections are very clear and the harmony is very simple. However, the counterpoint is pretty elaborate and a few parts – especially, the violins – require some virtuosity. The score is not very complex but the middle section is somewhat tricky because it has no metre (i.e. no barlines and no time signatures) and a bit of contemporary notation is needed. I have uploaded the file to the Musescore site. Here’s the link:

//musescore.com/user/361186/scores/2142116

I won’t go into a long and detailed explanation of my experience transcribing this score on Musescore. You can see the result in the link above. I prefer to simply summarise a few interesting things I discovered:

1. There is no information in the online documentation (or at least I was incapable of finding any) about what things can be changed in the parts without affecting the full score and vice versa. I had to figure it all out by myself, trying things like making something invisible in the part and then seeing if it also became invisible in the full score (It doesn’t, by the way) and stuff like that. Of course, this is not such a terrible omission but I still think the documentation should explain in detail how parts are handled.

2. Frames in the score create fixed line breaks in the parts. I wanted to use frames to separate systems and place some texts (like footnotes) but it was impossible. Frames do not only appear in the parts (which they shouldn't, in my opinion) but they also break the lines in the same places as in the full score and there’s no way to fix it. In the end, I had to let go the idea of using frames at all and used spacers instead. For the texts I used Staff Text and then placed each by hand.

3. I was a bit disappointed to find out that all the careful work I had painstakingly done in manually resolving all collisions between objects was lost in the parts. I had to do it all again. “Oh, the pain, the pain!” Fortunately, it’s a short piece and it involves only six instruments. I would have gone crazy with a piece for full orchestra. I read that the solution for this comes in Musescore 3.0, which apparently will use “intelligent” algorithms to automatically resolve all collisions. Kudos for the Musescore team!

4. One thing that I missed a lot was the ability to copy and paste lines/spanners. It speeds up my workflow considerably. There’s a way of doing it by clicking Cmd+Shift (on a Mac) and dragging the object. However you have to do this one line/spanner at a time. You can’t make a selection and copy/paste them somewhere else. I wonder if this is something that could be solved in a future update of Musescore 2 and not have to wait until version 3.

5. There’s a bug in Musescore regarding beams that cross a barline. They look great until a line break occurs and the second measure is moved to the next line. The continuation of the beam then jumps up on the page and can’t be dragged down to it’s proper place. Take a look at the piano part on page 8 of my score. Don’t be fooled. There are no beams crossing the bar line where line breaks occur. I have carefully placed small lines with their width increased to 0.50 at the end of one line and the beginning of the next one. One painful detail here is that line breaks are different in the part so I had to do a lot of tweaking, placing lines on the score and hiding them on the part and vice versa.

6. One thing that I discovered is that the text in text frames can have a different format in the full score than the same text in the parts. Line breaks can occur at different places, for example. However, I then discovered that you could in fact delete a word in the part and the change would not be reflected in the full score. This means that these objects are not linked; something that must be corrected.

7. It would be a good thing to include a “special page break” function that would allow a user to insert a blank page in the full score or in the parts. In the full score, this helps to start another movement in an odd page (if the previous one also ended in an odd page). In the parts, this helps to solve problems with page turning.

8. To my greatest admiration, Musescore was capable of doing some stuff better than Sibelius. For example, there’s a bug in Sibelius were the accidentals of cross-staff notes are repeated on every occurrence of the note. You have to hide them one at a time (it won’t work if you select them all first) or use a plugin to solve the issue (which will simply hide the accidentals). Musescore also places mid-measure clefs correctly, while Sibelius doesn’t. I have to adjust them by hand all the time. Finally, slurs are better placed in Musescore than in Sibelius (although, to my taste, the shape is not good; too flat on the edges and too high in the middle). A slur that ends in a stem is not placed above it, like in Sibelius, but at ⅔ the distance of the stem, which is accustomed in music engraving. And the list continues.

On the overall, I think Musescore performs pretty well. Once version 3, with its “Smart Layout” feature is released, its users won’t have a thing to envy from their peers that use Finale or Sibelius, except good playback. Now, you may argue that this is a feature that a music notation software shouldn’t care of but since Sibelius and Finale did it, the rules of the game have changed. And the ability to create realistic mock-ups directly from a score writer is much appreciated on these days. It saves a lot of time!

Finally, I must say that I managed to do all that I needed to do. The score looks exactly as I wanted; even if I had to suffer a little to resolve all collisions by hand and to find a way to address the problem I mentioned in point 5. The only thing that I couldn’t do was adding title pages, but I managed to create them on LibreOffice and joined them with a pdf-handling software (however, they are of course not included in the Musescore file that you can see on the link above). The dynamic-part feature works pretty well and the parts look great. My congratulations to the Musescore team! I wish I had a program like this when I started composing!

Antonio