More thoughts on musescore and midi
I've just completed another video wherein musescore provided the midi input. It's at
The instrumentation is simple, just piano and violin, so I needed everything to be just right in order for the performance not to sound mechanical. I accomplished this by attaching musescore to LinuxSampler (fantasia interface) so I could use individual soundfonts rather than the big GM bank, then passed the output through an equalizer (jamin) and added reverb with zita-rev1. The final mix was captured directly from the soundcard with ffmpeg.
The project was instructive since it was my first time using musescore strictly for controllable midi input to an external sampler (the score was originally engraved with lilypond, which generated the base midi file as well).
What I discovered is that I prefer musescore to any other midi editing software.
I'm a composer. I think "score". When I'm realising midi, I need a full score in front of me, one that's in the same format as what I'd be reading at the piano or the conductor's stand. I need to be able to click on notes in the score and adjust them according to the surrounding context (eg where phrases begin and end), which is easiest to grasp when I can see the final score. Piano roll notation, commonly found in midi editors, doesn't cut the mustard.
The developers must get tired of people going on about musescore and midi since their main thrust is notation, not midi. Unfortunately, they've integrated midi just well enough for musescore to be an almost perfect tool for realising scores in addition to engraving them. With just a few more features (eg being able to select different channels for any instrument, similar to the normal/pizz/trem dialogue available for strings), a few tweaks to the ones already present, and greater stability generally (I still have to "touch" the mixer volumes and whatnot every time I load a file in order for them to work), "almost perfect" would become "just right".