Decibel (or other marks) on channel strips and sliders
Sometimes having more instruments in a score seems to give distortion on playback. One solution is to reduce the level of most of the instruments, then if necessary boost the master slider control.
I was curious as to what the marks by the sliders in MS 3.6 represented - are they in dBs or something else?
Probably not, as attempts to verify the levels by changing them gave varying results.
Also, would it make sense or be possible to have some form of overload indicator on such playback channel strips? Perhaps not - but it might be useful. I guess another mod would be to have compressors on channels to minimise potential overloads - but that is going into DAW territory. Not sure whether MS4 would have anything like this.
In the meantime, some form of graded markings which might have a meaningful basis could be helpful - both for 3.6 and for MS 4.x
Comments
Since playback is via MIDI, the mixer needs to operate in units that translate that way. So, as far as I know, the channel sliders correspond to MIDI volume messages (scale 0-127). The master slider is explicitly labeled as dB, which of course, doesn't literally tell you the decibel levels (it can't know how loud your system volume is or how powerful your amplifier/speaker are), but represents an offset from some nominal reference level - getting outside my area of expertise here, though.
Note there is already a visual level meter in the Synthesizer window in MuseScore 3. By expanding on things like that into more DAW-like territory is definitely the sort of thing that seems consistent with the direction of MuseScore 4. Since it will support VST's, you could presumably install VST compressors on any channels you like. Also not my area of expertise, so I can't really advise further on how that might work in practice.