Musescore is an excellent piece of software

• Feb 4, 2013 - 21:19

I've been a Linux/lilypond user since forever, but decided last year to give WYSIWYG score creation a whirl. After trying out what's available by way of free and open source software, I settled on Musescore.

I'm very impressed. After giving myself a reasonable amount of time to learn the program, and thus not be guilty of the "why does this feel so awkward and stupid?" syndrome that accompanies working with unfamiliar software, I came to appreciate one aspect of Musescore in particular. While I have a number of quibbles with it--and who doesn't? score creation is an art, and no two people's aesthetics are ever identical--Musescore rarely presents me with a score object that cannot be manipulated to suit my preferences. I may not like the default curve of slurs, or pedal markings that have no default placement, or the management of two voices sharing the same note on a staff, but at least I can fix them easily and get things precisely the way I want.

Lilypond, the granddaddy of all score writing software, offers the same flexibility, but without the WYSIWYG ease of Musescore. I'm very fussy about my scores, which is why I gravitated to lilypond lo, these many years ago. Musescore, however, has shown me that a mature WYSIWYG score editing program is capable of satisfying my admittedly stringent requirements while reducing the time needed to produce not merely satisfactory, but beautiful results.

As concerns midi output, I acknowledge that this is not the main thrust of the program, but I would like to point out that if one is prepared to put effort into the generation of acceptable midi, the results can be made to sound surprisingly musical. ("Effort" means adjusting the velocity, ontime, offtime, and tempo of virtually every single note.)

I've started posting some of my work with Musescore on YouTube, and I encourage anyone interested to check out my channel. Just type "Peter Schaffter" into the YouTube search bar and ignore the rather insulting suggestion that you meant playwrite, Peter Schaffer.

Of particular interest to serious musicians will be the complex piano score for The River (Oh Waly, Waly) and the orchestral arrangement of Farewell to Nova Scotia. In both cases, not only are the scores as clear and balanced as one could hope for, but the midi performances are remarkably warm and human-sounding. I can confidently state that any infelicities in the score or the midi are entirely the result of being my own proofreader.

I look forward to the long-awaited version 2.0, which, if I read the forum correctly, has been stuck in the works for rather longer than expected. When questioned about the release date of 2.0, one of the developers cited a maxim with which I am unfamiliar: "Release when it's ready." The usual formulation, at least within the open source and Unix world, is "Release early, release often." As a software developer myself (the "mom" macroset for groff), I know the temptations of trying to get everything right before a release, but they rarely pay off. Two seconds into a "perfect" release and someone will already have found something you overlooked.

Excellent work. A big thank you to the Musescore team.

Comments

• Feb 5, 2013 - 11:00

Very well 'produced'! I can only imagine the care and the time you spent in fine tuning articulation, dynamics balance, tempo and all the other details. And many thanks for sharing!

May I ask which sound found(s) did you use?

Thanks,

M.

Reply

• Feb 5, 2013 - 20:50

Both Farewell and The River use GS FluidSynth v1.43.

I find, as do many others, that soundfont choices are always a compromise. With Farewell, I chose FluidSynth1.43 because the cello in no other font had the right degree of throatiness; however it meant putting up with a truly awful clarinet (fortunately in a supporting role), a flute with vibrato wide enough to drive a truck through, and painfully sluggish strings.

On the subject of sluggish strings, I find that the "Slow strings" are nearly always preferable to the default strings, which have an attack worthy of a gladitorial contest. The problem with slow strings is that the gentler attack is usually so slow that the strings seem to lag behind the beat. A tip to correct that problem, one that I haven't seen elsewhere in the forums, is to set the ontime offset in Note Properties to a negative value (between -5% and -10%, depending on the tempo and the length of the note). In a texture where other things are going on, the slightly early attack is inaudible, meaning the note seems to come in properly on the beat, and at the full dynamic level.

I understand that ms v2.0 will allow some flexibility in using instruments from more than one soundfont. I'm certainly looking forward to that!

Reply

• Feb 6, 2013 - 07:08

I checked out the Vienna Symphony library, but when I tried to download it, what I got instead was a Windows executable file (some sort of downloader/installer). I run Linux exclusively, so I need the actual soundfont. Too bad. Looks very promising.

Reply

• Feb 6, 2013 - 15:49

Unless I'm missing something, Vienna Symphonic Library is a series of commercial products, and pretty expensive ones (hundreds of dollars each) at that. So I'm not sure what sort of Windows execuable you might have found to download, but the actual library itself is something you would have to buy, and then it would presumably come in a form you could use - assuming these are available in soundfount format at all. I am not sure if the Italian discussion was implying that there is way to get to get any of Vienna sounds in soundfont format or not.

Reply

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.