The MuseScore Symphony (Symphony in D minor) now complete and online

On #1, I've been following the thread you cited. I included it in my short list of required fixes because it's a biggie.

On #2, the piano roll editor is next to useless in its present state. Can you imagine having to use that awful thing to edit hundreds of notes? You're right, it can be done--at the risk of blindness and a positively murderous rage resulting from frustration. :) Definitely not the way to go. The most sensible place to make off-time adjustments is on the score, which you can read and make sense of, unlike piano roll notation which provides no useful information about the structure of a score, and thus no easy way of locating notes in need of tweaking. Was there a technical/programming reason on- and off-times were removed as controllable parameters from inside the GUI? If not, they should be re-implemented.

On #3, I've already raised the issue and explained it, and gotten the same response from you, Marc. I really don't understand why something so obviously useful is so hard to get across. Perhaps it's a terminology problem? Or perhaps that your thinking is too closely focused on the GM soundbank standard? I'm suggesting these because of this sentence: "...surely you don't literally need a separate MIDI channel just to change instruments - allowing a separate *mixer* channel that still transmitted on the same MIDI channel (a la trumpet normal/muted) should suffice?"

Trumpet normal and trumpet muted are not transmitted on the same MIDI channel. The two mixer channels represent two separate, uniquely identified MIDI channels, as I know well from wiring them up to linuxsampler. Trumpet normal has a unique channel number (say, 7) that I hook up to my trumpet normal samples, telling linuxsampler to listen for signals on channel 7, and trumpet mute has a unique channel number (in this case, 8) that I hook up to my muted trumpet, telling linuxsampler to listen for signals on channel 8. The Staff Text Properties dialogue and the xml file confirm that these are, indeed separate channels.

Trumpet is the perfect example of why we need to be able to assign multiple channels (a la Trumpet) to a single staff. You don't write a separate staff for muted trumpet parts, you write con sord. over the trumpet staff and assign it the "mute" channel using the Staff Text Properties dialogue. It would be counter-intuitive to the way musicians think to use the Change Instruments dialogue for this purpose because you aren't changing instruments. The same, of course, applies to Strings staves, which automatically get three channels: normal, pizzicato, and tremolo. You don't set up separate staves for pizz. strings; you write "pizz." over the staves and switch to the pizzicato channel with the Staff Text Properties dialogue.

Now, if your thinking is limited to the GM soundbank standard, there's no need for other instrument staves to have more than one channel associated with them. Problem is, the GM standard is woefully inadequate for substantial orchestral work because the soundbanks don't have slots for all the required instrumental sounds. For example, trombones are played with mutes, but there's no GM slot for "muted trombone". And trumpets themselves are played with Harmon, straight, cup, etc. mutes--so "muted trumpet" isn't sufficient. And strings--hell, what can you do with just "normal" (which could be anything from under-one-bow legato to markedly détaché), pizzicato (is that regular pizz., left-hand pizz., or Bartok pizz.?), and tremolo? What about sul tasto/sul pont./con sord./harmonics/etc.? Or French Horns--bells up, stopped. These aren't unusual effects, they're a routine part of what composers have been calling for for centuries.

The only way to render these timbral changes is by using a different soundfont, which entails a tailored arrangement of channels and samples that removes any need whatsoever for thinking in terms of the GM soundbank standard.

The changes have one thing in common: you indicate them over the staff of the instrument to which they apply, exactly the same way you indicate "con sord." over a trumpet part. You don't set up separate staves to accomodate them, and you don't "change instruments" (as far as the score is concerned).

So how do you accomplish it in MuseScore? You can't do it with the Change Instrument dialogue because the list of choices it presents is GM standard-based and doesn't contain the very sounds you're looking for. Besides, in addition to calling up the dialogue and selecting the "new" instrument, you have to erase the word "Instrument" and type in what you want instead, possibly having to change the text parameters as well, which would get very annoying after a while. More significantly, every invocation of Change Instrument creates a new Mixer/MIDI channel. Every time! Six instances of "Muted Trombone"s (were such possible) would result in six new channels. Even worse, Change Instrument alters the channel assignment of all instruments that come after it. If you're working with an external sampler--virtually a necessity for substantial orchestral scores--that means re-wiring everything each time you use Change Instrument (assuming you're composing, as opposed to merely transcribing), unless you've mapped out your as yet unfinished new composition perfectly in advance. Even if you have, the decision to add or remove even one of your alternates means re-wiring.

The solution to this problem is blazingly simple but nowhere documented: 1) before you start note entry, save your score as an .mscx file; 2) open the .mscx file; 3) locate the staves where you'll need to switch from one instrument sound to another; 3) add as many xml <Channel name="name"> stanzas as you need, choosing names that will mean something when you call up the Staff Text Properties dialogue.

A simple, real-world example of this would be setting up Flutes such that you can switch between a due and solo, and having a third option that allows you to call upon a more expressive soundfont for passages written specifically to feature the principal flautist. This is a setup I use frequently, with demonstrably better, more accurate, and more realistic playback than relying on the GM standard. My three channels are called normal, sect., and alt. Once flutes are set up this way, all I have to do to switch to, say, a due is add Staff Text (Ctrl-t) that says "a due" and call up the Staff Text Properties dialogue, which looks like this, to change to the appropriate channel:

Flutes Staff Text Properties dialogue

The advantages are obvious: non-fussy text entry, musical directions in the score that are properly reflected in the playback, and no "new" channels being created every time you switch back and forth between solo and a due, thus a smaller mixer window and no re-wiring.

My repeated suggestion that the ability to add (and name) multiple channels to staves be part of the GUI, rather than something only done by editing the .mscx file, is based on four distinct advantages: 1) the Edit=>Instruments dialogue is the logical place to do it; 2) it relieves non-technically-oriented users from having to edit an .xml file; 3) in the case of changing your mind about the number of channels you need allotted to a single staff, you don't have to close the file in MuseScore, open and edit the .mscx file, then re-open it in MuseScore; 4) other than re-designing the Edit=>Instruments dialogue somewhat, it would be trivial to implement, since all that's required is adding simple .xml stanzas to the .mscx file. Come to think of it, it would mean you could use the .mscz compressed file and never have to worry about saving as .mscx.

I really can't make this any clearer: accurate playback requires that playback do what the score says, so if you say, of first violins, con sord., you need to tell that con sord. to switch to the "violins with mutes on" channel. That can only be done if the first violin staff has a channel set up for muted violins. FWIW, I generally use five to six channels per string part to handle all the eventualities.

I don't post my original MuseScore documents since many of them, including movements of the Symphony, suffer from the "wandering hairpin" problem. Plus, of course, playback from them is well-nigh impossible without my audio setup and soundfonts. If you're interested in PDFs of the score, they're available from my website at //www.schaffter.ca/scores.html , or will be once they propagate through the system.

Oh, I wouldn't even begin to suggest that MuseScore should, or could, provide that level of playback quality out-of-the-box. What I do feel is that the midi events it sends need to be sufficiently complete and user controllable such that quality playback can be achieved by plugging it into a good external audio chain, basically what I've been working towards. All that's required of MuseScore for this is good midi handling, nothing more.

It's funny how when you put on a different pair of analytic glasses, you see things completely differently. You're a publisher, so for you, quality playback is an adjunct to submitting a score to a publisher. I'm a composer, with works that are never likely to be performed, let alone published. The digital revolution has made it possible for me to create performances of these works that I can share with the public, so playback isn't an adjunct, it's the whole point of the exercise. MuseScore already makes it possible to create exceptional scores for printing, but they're meaningless to people who can't read music. What means something is listening to the music, rendered as accurately and as sensitively as possible by a virtual orchestra. Perfect realism isn't, of course, possible, but a good simulation is more than enough to move listeners, and to clue them into your musical thinking.

Interesting that your company sticks to the south side of 1750. When I conceived the Symphony in D minor, I was thinking just a little north, around 1750-1775. Sort of Mannheim with vestigial traces of the Baroque.