Just a few thoughts from a new user
Apologies for the rambling first post. Please forgive me if these are supposed to go elsewhere. I'm off sick with Covid so it's the perfect time to test out the new Musescore. I'm a Sibelius user of over a decade, professional instrumentalist and engraver, and I compose too. As a new user of Musescore some of my issues are likely to be a case of user-error, and I'd appreciate gentle instructions on how to do what I want to do.
It bugs me that when choosing sounds in the mixer (ie moving from Basic to Muse Sounds) that the instrument sounds are in alphabetical order. I know that's a sensible order, but when doing a choir it's quite hard to go 3rd, 1st, 4th, 2nd (Sop, Alto, Ten, Bass) and quite possibly confusing for strings - viola comes first!
Maybe this could be a toggleable option - we could choose alphabetical order, or we could choose score order (which is determined when choosing instruments at setup).
Similarly this comes with choosing the section. Brass is first, and Woodwind last, but for orchestral scores it's instinctive to look for woodwind at the top.
When playing back a choir score, it sounds beautiful - great job! But could we have a little bit of echo when playback stops so that it sounds a bit more natural? Having the sound cut off so abruptly actually diminishes the immersion and reminds you that, alas, the choir is virtual and not real!
It's also really annoying that to open and close the mixer you have to click at the top of the page despite your attention being drawn to the bottom. I'm forever searching for a close button on the mixer itself only to not find one.
When making a new score, having the 'Back' button on the final page of setup in the same position as 'Next' has been all time really confused me because I thought there were endless pages of things to setup, before I realised I was just pressing Back. It would be better for 'Next' to be empty on the final page (to prevent people clicking 'Done' mindlessly too!) and for Back to be further left.
For choosing time signatures, being able to scroll to make the numerator bigger would be great, as at the moment you can only click on the arrow or type.
When I write a quadruplet across a bar of 6/8, it's making the quavers inside it into dotted quavers. This is wrong, because if the quavers were dotted it wouldn't need the tuplet marking!
Crotales, in 'orchestral order', ended up between winds and brass.
It would be nice to be able to resize the pallette box on the left of the screen and have the tiles reorder or resize themselves accordingly. There's a lot of empty space that's detracting from the score.
You should be able to scroll in the mixer.
'Transpose' really needs to remember if you did it by key or by interval each time one uses it. I never use key transposition, and it's really annoying to keep changing it. Toggleable option on this would be great, I'd love to be able to hide key transposition (literally, in 15 years of Sibelius usage, I've never used it).
All that aside, for free software, this is fantastic. I'm not converted wholly yet as I need to test weirder stuff on it and get used to note input (I seem to be forever correcting notes instead of writing new ones and I want to get away from using my mouse all the time...), but I honestly think I will keep using this. I tried Dorico and liked its shininess but it felt incomplete. Musescore doesn't, it feels ready. Great job.