Drumline Dynamics Issues after Muse 4.4 Update
Hello,
I compose and arrange music for marching percussion, among other things. Since MuseScore 4 came out, I have been using a port of the Muse 3 MDL sounds with sforzando, paired with some custom .drm files (all attached for replicability). I am aware new Muse Drumline sounds were released with Studio 4.4. While I appreciate many of the update's new functionalities, I still prefer the sounds I've been working with and would like to keep using them.
A strange issue arose when I updated to MuseScore Studio 4.4.1 which I cannot make much sense of.
Accents now play back WAY louder—seemingly at max velocity. You can hear this in the two audio exports I have linked. "Jaguar Jam" is what I had saved on my machine before the update. "Jaguar Jam 4.4" is a new export after the update. You can hear a big difference in the accented notes, especially for Cymbals. From playing around in other projects, the issue persists and is even more noticeable at lower dynamic levels. It appears accents boost the velocity to the same (very high) level regardless of the written dynamic. Note velocity values in Playback Properties are unaltered. Needless to say, this makes creating dynamic representations of a piece very difficult.
Other potentially pertinent information: I'm running macOS Ventura 13.5 on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air. The soundfonts and .drm's have not changed since I started using Muse 4. I have a saved template with these soundfonts and drumsets that I create most of my Drumline scores from, which has also not changed since I started using Muse 4.
I would normally attach supporting files here for replicability, but file sizes and quantities were unfortunately prohibitive. Please see this folder instead: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1kd0JUSiNySKAq0YtNB5ddWfSJ5l…
I initially was going to post this to Bug Reports—I figured the Playback community might have more insight into soundfont issues though. Any insight would be wonderful as I am stumped. I understand an easy solution is "quit bodging together Drumline sounds and use Muse Drumline straight out of the box." Hopefully there's a way I can still use my preferred sounds.
Thanks!
(An earlier version of this post included details about recurring crashes when using sforzando sounds. It appears reloading the sounds template has fixed that.)