MuseScore 4
musescore.orgI stopped using Audacity and swore to never use a MuseScore product again after their developers threatened a GitHub contributor who made a crawler with deportation and torture.
> "Upon further investigation, it became clear that Wenzheng Tang is a Chinese national, but not resident in China. As a guest in his current country, his residency status is predicated on a number of conditions, one of which is not violating the law.
> "If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country.
> "This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his - Fuck 学习强国, which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received."
See 'MuseScore/Audacity employee theatening to destroy a Chinese developer's life' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881539)
I find it pretty distasteful that they scrubbed their comments (thankfully Archive picked them up https://web.archive.org/web/20210719115639if_/https://github...), deleted their GitHub, and are still employed as the Director of Strategy at Muse Group.
I can't find any examples where Daniel Ray, the author of these comments, apologised or acknowledged these. They simply scrubbed them, and their employer continued to employ them.
Disgusting, if I was associated with Audacity, Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, audio.com, StaffPad, MuseClass or ToneBridge - I'd be pretty revolted by discovering this now, after-the-fact.
That link seems to show a very different story though? What they said was that they _hadn't_ requested a takedown for those reasons
"Simply put, the actual process of requesting the take down and proving violation would have severe implication on Wenzheng Tang, so I have hesitated in the hopes he would simply choose to take it down himself."
"So, both repositories remain up, for now, not because we are powerless to take it down... it is that the process of exercising this power could very literally ruin the actual life of another person."
"It'd be a shame if.. You had an accident.."
Thanks for bringing this to light. That is the most disgusting behavior I have ever seen from copyright people.
Nothing is being brought to light. The comment was not well considered but it was so obviously not a threat either.
Some folk took the comment and decided to hyper sensationalise it. In truth, what the Muse guy was trying to say was that he wanted the offending user to see reason and stop hosting software that allowed users to get free access to paid content. His appeal was that is was pointless to risk legal action and he was right. Incidentally, they were well within their rights to pursue legal action. They cannot permit a backdoor to licensed content to exist.
Also worth mentioning that after this incident, they never did pursue legal action - so they obviously found some quiet solution instead. Of course that ruins a good story. God people love outrage so much, they are just unable to see the boring reality of things.
Bullshit. What they did is called veiled threat of violence. They implicitly threatened to sue him, an act that threatens his legal permanence in the US if convicted. They thought far enough about the consequences of their actions that they reminded him of the possibility of being arrested, tortured and disappeared in China for wrongthink if deported.
I really don't give a shit if he infringed a million copyrights. Not a single person on this earth deserves that fate, especially not over copyright infringement. That's seriously disgusting.
Ah, more of this bullshit. I think this is about 90% hyperbole.
They asked some kid to stop creating systems that circumvent their licensing deals and he wouldn't do it. Then one of the employees appealed directly, using clumsy reasoning, and then loads of people pretended it was a threat and went on an outrage spree.
So tedious and dumb.
Perhaps off-topic but I use MuseScore 3 occasionally and it's great that there's a free alternative for amateurs like me who only use such software a few times a year. But it feels like it such a missed opportunity - it's 90% of the way to being a great piece of software but is hampered by what seems to be ideological attachment to a particular idea of what it means to "edit" a score.
It feels like using a word-processor with a stuck "Insert" key - you're stuck in "overwrite" mode. This works for some aspects of entering music but is incredibly frustrating for others. This point has been raised many times on the fora but they are often dismissed in thinly disguised passive aggressive way ("you just don't understand the model, come back when you do").
This approach forces you to nail down the rhythm and measures first otherwise you're in a world of pain later. While a natural flow for me (and seemingly many others given the number of queries on the subject) is to start with the melody without too much regard for measures and fix up the timing later.
The odd thing is that it's clear that internally/technically, there is nothing that would prevent them allowing you to use the software in a more natural way (that supports cut/copy/insert/paste etc.) because there are ways to actually "insert" but it's made incredibly obscure by the way the UI hides this ability. I got the impression that the people running the project just didn't want to make it "easy" for users to work with a score in this way because it's just not the "correct" way to work with a score.
Despite this, I'm grateful for the effort that has gone into the Musescore series. Also I'll probably check out Musescore 4. I like Tantacrul's youtube channel.
I'm stuck in a local maximum of lilypond in emacs and zathura (a PDF view) split vertically. I'm sure if I learned another tool I might be better, but it's "good enough" for my occasional use.
This is my zen... well I use frescobaldi. But lilypond combined with git is like everything I've ever wanted for score editing.
It's heading in the right direction... slowly. (4 has lots of quality of life improvements) It reminds me of blender a few years ago with lots of people stuck in the "you need to learn it" mentality that prevents basic improvements. I like to think that the recent progress is Tentacrul's influence, but it's probably more than that.
But yeah... I learnt not to ask for a better workflow on the forum. It's full of "it's a complex app, you don't understand it" people.
Absolutely on the money. I was pretty excited about it, and after putting some time into it I abandoned it. I didn't remember exactly why, but your post reflects my experience precisely. It's so mind-bogglingly cumbersome to do anything in it that I'd rather buy competent software instead, or work by hand.
When I asked about the incredibly crippled editing, I was attacked in the forums. I mean... the people were assholes.
I totally agree with this. It would be much easier to use if you could put the pitches in first and then work on the rhythm. I still use it but it is difficult to use because this issue.
MuseScore has two separate components:
- Musescore.com is run by Muse Group, formerly Ultimate Guitar. This is the sheet music sharing site which has a few controversies with downloading user scores, although this has improved a bit recently.
- Musescore.org is the GPLv3 notation software which they've announced the release for.
Muse is very good at keeping these two parts separated from each other. For example, the new "Muse Sounds" is installed via the closed-source "Muse Hub" (which economically makes sense as providing high-quality samples would be a fruitful business opportunity in the future) through a shared library.
Personally I think that this is a nice balance between maintaining the open-source software and providing features that practically only work with commercial backing - the reason that this could occur so quickly is because it reuses the playback engine and samples from StaffPad (https://www.staffpad.net), one of Muse's acquisitions.
The confusing bit is that the MuseScore mobile apps come from musescore.com. If you ask questions about the mobile apps on musescore.org then someone will likely treat you rudely, from the Q&A I've seen.
I think they've brought it on themselves by using the same name for different things. If they used distinct names (like they did for the new stuff) then they wouldn't be in this mess.
The MuseScore mobile app is a complete piece of shit. It's obviously under the hapless MuseScore.com team because it focuses on the same stuff.
I'd love if that team up-skilled in the same way the FOSS app has.
Any privacy caveats to installing Muse Hub?
The owners tried to put Google Analytics into Audacity when they took it over. I wouldn't touch either project if you care about privacy.
MuseScore is the reason I stopped pirating GuitarPro. Blender is the reason I stopped pirating 3DS Max. Krita is the reason I stopped pirating Photoshop.
I'm doing my best to be fully FOSS these days and I can't thank the devs of these programs enough for giving me faith in humanity.
Do you miss anything from Guitar Pro in MuseScore?
I'm sick of paying for upgrades to GP in the hope that the next version is less bad than the previous version. It peaked at either 5 or 6 (I think) but they required Mac users to upgrade to get a 64-bit binary. 7.0 feels much slower (Electron?) and seems to insist on keeping your mic open for some silly feature.
Guitar pro doesn't have as many features but it's a much better tool for rapid prototyping when you don't have a complete concept of the score in your head. It's easy to make continual changes on the fly using your keyboard without having to worry about the reflow, whereas muse score is incredibly stubborn about making sure that you have exactly the number of notes and durations in each bar.
When you're in a draft mode where are you just wanna be able to create it can be incredibly obstructive. I actually do a fair amount of prototype musical work in guitar pro before exporting it out as music XML and importing it into MuseScore for final typesetting.
GuitarPro 5 is an absolute masterpiece for quickly throwing together ideas. Version beyond 5 are just not worth it and I say it as someone who actually paid for 8.
Every piece of software I tried so far to replace GP5 has led me to return to GP5 within a couple of weeks.
TuxGuitar is fine for me.
TIL that the development of TuxGuitar has restarted
Add Darktable vs Lightroom to the mix.
Yeah for sure, thanks for reminding me! Except I use RawTherapee, which was actually the first FOSS program I swapped to from a paid (pirated) one without any sort of philosophical justification. It was just miles and miles better than the commercial apps (at least for my workflow).
I never understand for RawTherapee, how/where to use the sliders. Or anything really, I get super confused. Lightroom 6 is clunky, but I understand what happens.
That's interesting. Main tab has the usual suspects - exposure compensation, contrast, brightness, saturation. Then there are curves, same in every image software under the sun . Then there's shadows/highlights, again - no originality whatsoever. Can you describe what sliders are confusing to you?
Rawtherapee is probably my most used open source app ever, even counting vim. Only issue with it for me is lack of support for Lightroom presets.
For sure the learning curve is steep, but the control you're rewarded with is unparalleled. (Plus there's CIECAM02, one of the greatest color spaces of all time)
Yes RawTherapee is great too!
Still looking for a replacement for Ableton Live :(
You can get an Ableton Live Lite license for ~$4 by buying certain phone apps.
Eg, the Koala Sampler app comes with a license for it, and it's actually a very fun wee program in itself.
It's not full Ableton - but it's incredible value for $4.
Depends how much of Ableton you're using, Ardour may be usable for you. But it's definitely limited if you want the more professional features.
What happened to their sheet music sharing website though? It seems like they're trying to extract money from the large back catalog of stuff people have uploaded to them.
I have a hard time trusting this company with anything, let alone my time and resources.
They do. It’s shitty. For a number of works, they don’t even have the rights.
Often they don't, but sometimes they do. There are "official scores" that have very limited use - you can't do much outside the mobile apps. In particular, you can't edit them in Musescore, so you'll have to reenter them from scratch.
So it seems like "having the rights" and "actually useful scores" don't intersect very well. Music publishers want to publish scores that you can't edit, which I find mostly useless since I usually want to adapt them. It seems doubtful that Musescore could fix this other than by helping users do technically illegal sharing, as they've done it.
Not 100% sure if this works anymore, but a "trick" I found is creating an account when they ask to sign up for free trial, go through the process, don't actually pay for the free trial, then go back to the sheet music you were trying to download and some of the formats such as PDF will now download.
Just be careful to cancel. They are dogs about it. Hate them.
Well, they have a tricky issue there, because all kinds of music publishers come after them for royalties when they host sheet music. Unfortunately music publishers try to extract money even if it's just a hobbyist transcribing their favourite pop or jazz tune or what it may be.
I've always found the website annoying, but you can see and play the scores without needing to pay for an account. (Or even have an account.)
The new "official scores" are an exception; you can't even see them without paying. A step backwards in my opinion.
If you really want one of my musescore files, send me a message and I'll be happy to email it. Odds are other people on the site will do similarly.
The software is free, the hosting and sharing service is paid.
Seriously, if you can't even accept this then let's just ban free software already.
The hosting is also free. I'm not paying anything to store my stuff on their website.
If they start blocking user scores that cover official scores, they'll be over a line.
They already do, but partially. You can upload anything, but can't make it public if they match the title to something known. I don't know what's the threshold / database they use, but if you want to see the message, try to call something "City of stars, la la land" and upload.
If you click on the logo at the top it takes you there.
I tried to sign up for a 7-day free trial, but when I clicked on that I got "You will be charged $3.69 today for one week." so having never heard of them before today, they already have me not trusting them.
Does anyone know if they avoided the controversies of Audacity, given they're also owned by Muse Group?
to be honest, I always kind of thought the substance of the controvery was overblown. it was telemetry that was only on in source builds. the thing that rubbed me wrong, if anything, is an open source being acquired by a commercial entity at all
I really hope they have a big overhaul coming for Audacity. It's a powerful tool but the UI is (at best) severely dated. Tantacrul's initial analysis of Audacity's UX had me hopeful that there'd be rapid progress towards modernizing it.
> [...]that'd be rapid progress towards modernizing it.
I misread this as "monetizing". almost snorted.
What's so bad about the UI? is it dated because of it's structure? or does it seem dated because of widgets (the style, the way it is drawn?)?
The super powered UI problem is not quite solved, unless you accept microsoft's ribbon interfaces as a solution
Tantacrul's original video was very good, if you haven't seen it already.
Here's a very straightforward example: zoom. The shortcut keys for zoom are ctrl 1/2/3, rather than ctrl +/-, or even just +/-. Further, the zoom options are in/normal/out/selection/toggle. None of those options will zoom to the full audio clip. Instead, to do that you need to look under "track size", which has the options "fit to width" (ctrl f) and "fit to height" (ctrl shift f). The CPO at the company where I work likes to say "if you do something differently from the rest of the marketplace, you need a damned good justification for doing so".
I get that Audacity has grown organically as a product over decades, and so its user interface may have preceded various conventions that have arisen over time in software, but it is extremely idiosyncratic.
I've always found it awful compared to what I always go back to, even in a VM, which is Sony/Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro).
The latter just seems much more intuitive when it comes to really basic cut/copy/trim/timeshift operations. Is there something I'm missing here?
> controversies of Audacity
What did I miss?
A VP threatening an open-source developer with deportation and torture: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/audacitys-new-owner-...
I had a horrible experience. I tried to buy the subscription and they charged me in USD rather than CAD. Support half explained that the mobile subscription and the website subscription were different things and just happened to have the same dollar amounts listed. But one was implicitly USD while the other specifically labelled CAD.
Whoops. MuseScore.com is not the same thing as this. I have never had a problem with this MuseScore.
How have these two sites not clobbered each other over the name?
The new MuseSound data files seem to be the result of the StaffPad aquisition. I haven't done an exhaustive comparison, but the sounds are the same SFZ-format, Opus compressed sounds that StaffPad uses. I don't know if the new MuseSampler is the same playback engine that StaffPad uses.
MuseScore really is wonderful. Use it for transcriptions all the time.
Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM1CcIRzJHE
Obligatory funny video review of MuseScore 3 UI: https://youtu.be/4hZxo96x48A
Same author also has a funny video on the UI of another music notation program, Sibelius: https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI
Since you don't mention it: This very same guy is the product manager for MuseScore 4 and was hired after his video ;)
And then proceeded to shamelessly ripoff Dorico, which is the actual state of the art.
Oh wow, had no idea! Thanks for bringing it up.
Thanks, I lost about 4-5 hours last night watching the the reviews he's done on multiple musical notation apps.
Entertaining, scathing and very educational. The latest video on the improvements made to MuseScore 4 is really interesting as well.
Wow!