MuseScore 4.2 — First impressions and feedback

Each of my forays into MuseScore 4 proves sufficiently jarring that I conclude I can't work with it ... except to investigate and occasionally test its many wonderful features. Playback, UI and regressions are the main foils. The UI is more organized but simultaneously more cumbersome, so I often have to dig for essential properties that were always visible in 3.6's Inspector, resulting in more clicks and wasted time. The experience leaves me short on compliments (which are so very well deserved in many areas) and long on reporting issues. So here goes:

Download

    As reported here Muse Guitars was extrememly slow to download. It took 3.5 hours.
    The total Muse Guitars Vol. 1 folder is 989.4 MB
        The single Acoustic Nylon.sts soundfont is just 112.8MB, as shown in the attached image.
        Other "acoustic" sts weigh in similarly
        The "electric" sts files may be about the same weight, but go as high as 400MB
    MacOS 13.5.2. Macbook Air M2, 24GB, 2TB SSD

Muse Guitars playback issues

    • Overall MuseGuitars (particularly Nylon) are pretty satisfying. And it's great to have muted notes now.
      Muse Guitars examples here but ...
    • There are issues with muted notes in Muse Guitars
    •  Muse Guitars>Acoustic Nylon volume is surprisingly soft
    •  Muse Guitars>Acoustic Nylon playback is very uneven volume on scores created before MuseScore 4.2
    •  Overall tone characteristics are improved ... but rather twangy on steel strings
       and Nylon can sway toward an unrealistic tone of hollow plastic tubes.
    • When I click a muted note (one with an x notehead) I hear the normal sound, not the sound that occurs in playback.

General playback issues

    • MuseScore 4.2 doesn’t “read” Len field values from MS 3.6 files.
      This means that any work done altering playback durations in 3.6's Piano Roll Editor are lost.

    • Neither Let Ring or nor Pedal impact playback of guitar standard notation or tablature.
      I tried switching sounds via the mixer and that made no difference.

    • We can set velocity values, note by note, but those velocities make no difference with Muse Sounds and Muse Guitars Vol. 1.
      See the last line of this score
      Note that velocities do work with MuseScore 4.2 when using the basic built-in soundFonts
      or VST instruments like those from Native Instruments or PianoTeq,

    • Let Ring symbol doesn’t display on both staves in a treble clef with linked tablature system.
       In contrast, a pedal symbol shows on both staves, as expected.

    • There’s still an unacceptably long delay between clicking a note and hearing its pitch.

    • Volume of clicked note differs from when the note sounds during playback
      I can see that that could be useful, but I find it pretty disturbing in my workflow.

    • Playback cursor is out of alignment with notation.
      Cursor precedes playback by about once eighth note in an example score.
      Didn’t check, but the extent of poor alignment may vary with tempo.

    • Clicking on a “range selection” fails to reset the playback point to the beginning of the range selection.
      This is a regression from MS 3.6

Tablature issues

    UPDATE: I mistakenly wrote: • There’s no longer a Guitar + Tablature template in File>New.
     Apologies: I looked under the Instruments tab rather that the Templates tab.
    **Subsequent UPDATE: More than half the timeMuseScore 4.2 crashes on Quit or pressing the window's close button

    • Create Linked Staff is still burried in Instrument>Settings
    Recommendation here.

    Someday I'd sure like to see a wizard or dialog that presents all guitar related settings.

Odd annoyances

     • I can’t paste text into File>Save file name. I often want to use a score's Title text as the file name ... and copy/paste is the simplest way to do so.

Stability

    • MuseScore 4.2 crashes every time I quit via File>Quit or by closing window via the OS Close Window button in the upper left.
      UPDATE: On day 1 MuseScore abended every time I quit. But today, day 2, it hasn't crashed once on Quit.