Numerous feature requests
I regard this topic as extremely critical/vital.
One of the most desirable features that MuseScore is missing is the ability to play back trills, tremolos, and glissandos. Finale can do them, so why can't MuseScore play those? I already asked that one time, and I didn't get a concrete answer. I'm one of those people who like concrete answers.
Also, MuseScore has terraced dynamics instead of gradual dynamics. So it's useless to put a hairpin in the score for the player to play back, because it won't take that notation into consideration. If there's a piano and forte marking with a crescendo hairpin between them, MuseScore would play the hairpinned passage piano and then abruptly shift to forte, where marked. Same if there's a forte and piano with decrescendo hairpin, or for any other scenario for that matter.
Music is not played like this; I found that Finale can take hairpins into consideration when playing back. MuseScore should be able to do this too if it's going to be a free alternative to other complex notation software.
When I put in text like "ritardando" and "accelerando," I expect it to respect those markings and take them into consideration when playing back what you wrote. Same for fermatas. Why can't MuseScore use fermatas in playback, but Finale can?
Finale is so much harder to use. MuseScore is very straightforward and intuitive. So it wouldn't hurt to add these features to the playback synthesizer.
Will all of these be added anytime soon? It's very limiting to not have these features when other notation software (that cost a fortune to use) does. Not everyone can afford notation software, so opting to go with those is not an option. The only option available is for MuseScore to include these features.
I might compose for the fun of it, but I find it irritating that MuseScore cannot play back trills, tremolos, glissandos, and take hairpins into consideration. This is why I have never written anything on MuseScore that contains trills, tremolos, or glissandos. It simply limits the composer's choices of what to write, just because the software does not support it. Music should never be limited in any way.
Please do not get me wrong. I love MuseScore and use it extensively. I thought I would never get to see the light of having free notation software that is just as good as (but currently falls slightly short of) Finale until I came across this. I'm just saying that MuseScore would be so much better if it had these features. That's why I'm being repetitive: to emphasize my points.
Please let me know if I am asking too much. I don't believe I am, however. Please hear me out on this.
Comments
I can give you a concrete (if not particularly authoritative) answer as to why MuseScore doesn't play back trills et al: playback is second priority to notation, and making this happen just hasn't been high enough priority - yet. I have no doubt that once the higher priority notation features catch up to the competition a bit more, then attention may turn to playback, but I suspect that's still a ways out. At least a year or two, I would guess. Although 2.0 does seem like it will have *some* playback improvements already, and that's probably less than a year out. Still, the main focus has been the infinitely more important notation features.
It's silly to say MuseScore doesn't support trills et. Al, though. MuseScore is a notation program, and it supports rhe notation of those markings just fine. So if you wish to compose using them, you certainly can, and the markings will display and print properly - just as MuseScore was intended for. the fact that it won,t do something relatively unimportant like playback isn't a limiter at all to actually producing notation, which again is the focus of MuseScore.
In reply to I can give you a concrete (if by Marc Sabatella
It is true that notation is more important than playback. But it is also important not to overemphasize one thing over another. What kind of playback improvements do you know of in 2.0?
In reply to It is true that notation is by dlee1
The main one I know of is support for a staff changing instruments mid-score. Looks like there are some sort of hookups for defining MIDI behaviors of texts, as opposed to being limited to just patches changes to channels that are predefined in the instrumnets.xml file. There is also a whole new organ playback subsystem, and some sort of under the hood improvements that I don't understand at all, but that result in some things (especially drums) just sounding better for any given soundfont. Something to do with how the synth module is managed at a pretty low level, I imagine. I think there are a few articulations that play back as well, but don't quote me on that.
Personally, I'd rate more completeplayback of articulations (including handling of slurs) and crescendo/decrescendo as top priority for playback enhancement, because they strike me as easily definabletasks that would add a lot of value. Next in line, for me personally, would be support for things like "accel." and "rit.", but now we're talking anout stuff that's going to beway more subjective and hence less likely to be satisfactory unless the user is given control over the process,which means designing an interface to give that control - overall, lots more work, I'm sure.
Finally, about 100 levels down onthe prioity list - to the point where there are at least five years worht of improvements that should come first IMHO - would be things like trills, where the system would be having to actually add a whole bunch of new notes as opposed to just fiddling with the playback of existing ones. That's got to be a nightmare to implement and manage, and given that no two human players would ever agree on how it should be played, would again practically require a whole new UI componenent for controlling the effect.
Given that it is trivially simple to add a playback staff and simply notate exactly what you want, that there is basically no way an automated system would actually play back as mich to liking as what I can easily enter myself into that playback staff, and it would be an enormous amount of work to implement a system that was barely any easier to use and didn't sound nearly as good, I can't see how this could possibly be a worthwhile thing to attempt until the actual important notation features are so complete and polished that the develops are sitting around looking for ways to keep busy.
Instead, I'd rather see effort focused on making the management of the extra playback staves simpler (the ability to make them 100% completely hidden from view with no effect on display or print. Right now, I do this by defining a "print score" as a "part" that I extract, which works well enough if I wait until I am done. But If I then want to make a change, I have to changeboth files. Linked parts will help, but I don't know how that will work with, for example, MuseScore.com. I'd like a single score displayed with the playback staves hidden but played them back. I thinkthis would be simpler to implement and also more effective and more generally useful than trying to add some sort of "intelligent" auto playback for trills and so forth.
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In reply to I can give you a concrete (if by Marc Sabatella
I know that MuseScore supports notation of those elements. I just want them to be played back without any workarounds, which seems impossible at the moment.
Did Finale have these playback features when it first came out?
In reply to I know that MuseScore by dlee1
Finale 1.0 was released in 1988... so 23 years ago... MuseScore 1.0 has been released 8 months ago...
In reply to 23 years by [DELETED] 5
I came on board with Finale in the mid 90's. At the time, it's playback facilities were more limited in most ways than MuseScore's are now. It was at least 10 years from initial release to the first release that I think one could unequivocably say was better than MuseScore 1.0 in the playback department. I am not as familiar with Sibelius, but it too was rather more primitive in playback in its initial years. My impression is that same ten-year figure is pretty much true for Sibelius. I know that as of 2005, it was still a long ways behind Finale and only barely ahead of where MuseScore 1.1 is right now. And yet it has become the #1 application of its kind in the world - I think in no small part due to the fact that from the beginning, they took notation and ease of use as top priorities, and only spent more time on playback once they had really nailed the more important stuff. The knock on Finale has always been that they've been too focused on adding features rather than focusing on the core functionality and usablity, and its been on the usability front where Sibelius has absolutely destroyed Finale in the market. Having a clear focus is a good thing, and I think MuseScore's is as solid as they come.