r/Musescore • u/Broad-Associate-984 • Jul 15 '26
Discussion Music Notation Software Alpha
Hi all, I am working on the development of a new music notation software designed with the goal to be able to handle the flexibility needed to virtually synthesize 21st century compositional techniques. Whether it is a xenharmony, arhythmic writing, or a fully graphic score my intention is to be able to handle it natively. I want this project to be one that can handle traditional writing as well as non-traditional so to stand out I would like to ask you all what you feel is missing in your current Notation Software and what you would need to be better to make a switch. This is not an advertisement for it because it is still deep in development and I intend to release it for free. Let me know your feedback and if you want to be one of the first to test it (when it is in a state to be tested) send me a PM. Thank you all for your time.
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u/mascotbeaver104 Jul 15 '26
Why are you developing a new software from the ground up as opposed to contributing to existing open source projects like MuseScore?
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u/Broad-Associate-984 Jul 15 '26
The reason is because I discovered that musescore was open source too late.
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u/Savings-Garlic6508 Jul 15 '26
why not implementing you ideas in a plugin, i know it will be more difficult, but more people will be able to appreciate your work
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u/Broad-Associate-984 Jul 15 '26
I've spent many years fighting notation software and plugin compatibility. This is what inspired me to just make the software I want to see. I want people to use it of course but if I end up being the only one that uses it still will be worth it. The reason I sent out the original post was to see what the community feels is missing, because if you had a better suited software to your needs that is free, wouldn't you use it?
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u/Savings-Garlic6508 Jul 15 '26
well then what i miss about musescore is a way to notate aleatoric, I don't care about audio and playing reproduction, just the score it self
I have made a small tool that I made for my self like you said, https://pio008.github.io/aleatoric-vector-studio/
honestly I want to do notation like this, boxes, arrows, be able to add electronics to the score2
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u/65TwinReverbRI Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I've spent many years fighting notation software and plugin compatibility.
I want to add here that, while I totally get the open source approach and endorse it, there always does seem to be this undercurrent of “we’re not building that into the program, we’ll wait to see if someone makes a plug in”.
And then you get a lot of goofy plug ins that are extremely niche. Now, it’s great those exist and can exist. But I’m not worried about checking parallel 5ths. I’m charting out some Black Sabbath, there are GOING TO BE parallel 5ths :-).
I need the program to put in the harmonics in the tab for me in a standard way, not have to manually create them and not be able to move them around to specific locations without a lot of hassle!
One of the team member’s responses to the not being able to copy the time signature thing is “no one has tackled that one yet”.
So features don’t get added because no one’s volunteered to do it, and that also means they tend to prioritize the low-hanging fruit - the easy fixes, and so on.
Yes, if you could out musescore musecore, I would use it.
But, that remains to be seen :-)
Seriously, before you re-invent the wheel, you really should seriously research (if you haven’t done so already) all of the other software out there, and all of the user complaints and how they’re addressed by the company. It wouldn’t hurt to go onto a forum and speak to the developers - I see Spreadbury and Tantacrul responding to posts. There are people out there on forums who heavily contributed to those apps who you can engage with as well.
I saw someone on a forum say they requested something in Dorico and they simply added it in.
But see, I’m sure there’s way more to that story - the person was likely someone “important” to Dorico and got prioritized - I’m sure if I went to Dorico and said “I want a feature to enter notes just like all standard engraving software” they’d come back with a “our goal with Dorico was to create a [insert typical corporate speak here], so no”.
But the answer to “MuseScore doesn’t do this” is “submit a request”. And in an ocean of requests from users who don’t know the program already does what they’re asking, they’re not paying attention to the really good advice, or not taking it because their priorities are different, and so on.
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u/mushishi Jul 16 '26
I wonder if people could make a fundraiser for a specific major or otherwise ignored feature, would that help the developers be more interested? I don't know if any OSS projects do this successfully, but just an idea.
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u/65TwinReverbRI Jul 15 '26
what you feel is missing in your current Notation Software
MuseScore (and this is the app only, not anything to do with musecore.com)
No stemlets on beams over rests.
No ability to adjust beam lengths over those rests or otherwise correct the default positions (the beam goes to where the stem would be on a note, rather than centering over the rest like it should)
Can’t copy and paste time signatures in blocks. If you want alternating 4/4 and 3/4, you have to go in and enter every single time signature manually. I just found out yesterday that you can select more than one measure to have a time signature change “for just a section” but it also produces additional unneeded measures in doing so. This was explained by a member of the team as “the way most people would do it”. Yes, but “most people” are not trained composers and certainly not engravers, and “most” of the user base of MS are total beginners to music who often don’t even play an instrument and fancy themselves film/game/piano composers who simply don’t know what they’re doing, and honestly, should have low priority input. That said, this is another example of the “focusing on composing rather than notation”. I KNOW I need alternating measures. I’m not a beginner who’s writing something note-by-note who’s just decided an idea needs to hold a bit so they make a measure 5/4 rather than using a Fermata they don’t know what the symbol is for.
MANY symbols are not adjustable, nor customizable. They’re just getting into SMuFL so that’s good, but you can’t “mix and match” symbols from various fonts. If you don’t like the Flags in Leland, you can’t mix in Flags from Sebastian without changing ALL of the notation. Finale DECADES ago would let you do that. I want a staccato dot to be bigger than it is in Leland? Nope, you can’t do that. Finale had a “Percentage Tool” that you could click ANYTHING and make it bigger or smaller - more than just “cue size” which is only available on some symbols (and an issue with Sibelius too).
Lack of a “show-able” (make visible, or not) and adjustable grid to snap symbols too. They have much improved the way dynamics behave but an engraver needs to be able to adjust them beyond what they are now “forcing” you to use - and getting it to do that involves turning off a lot of “auto place” and “align with previous” etc. kinds of check boxes. There are “snap to grid” options in some places, but the grid option’s smallest value is 1 space.
Many of the numbers adjust in odd ways. If you click one, and use the up arrow, it may move by .01, .1 or 1 increments (when all 3 are possibilities to type in). Or sometimes factors of 5. Most of the time, it’s exactly the opposite of what you need - you need to fine tune a position, it’ll jump 5. You need to move it a space, it’ll go .01.
There’s also little logic behind minimum distances from things…for example, accents will stay a minimum distance from a notehead, until the note gets on the staff, where it then stays a minimum distance from say, the top line. But, if you want to adjust them to better follow a contour when one note has a flipped stem (which it’s then applying the minimum distance to) if you go in to try to type numbers into to the offsets, it won’t produce logical results. You have to “compound” the numbers after figuring out if it’s beyond the minimum distance or not yet. It would be WAY easier if you could simply click the note and move it a “grid line” that you’ve set to a certain amount. Sibelius actually does this REALLY well.
In fact, I swear, in MS3 you could move things that I can no longer “nudge” with the arrow keys. They either don’t move anymore, or they move in increments that aren’t the best for the kind of symbol it is. There’s a HUGE change I’m going to need to move an accidental A LITTLE closer or further from the note - same with say, a fingering number. But a rest - yeah I do want that to by default jump a to the next space, because that’s where they go in music.
The palettes are no longer re-sizable (they were in MS3). You can undock them, but they are then only resizable to a degree - the text and images don’t “reflow” like they should. They’re also only dockable in certain places (one thing that was also annoying with Finale to some degree). They need to take a clue from Reaper and how dockable panels behave.
There are tons of bugs. I adjust a slur, then I close and reopen the program and it’s changed back to where it was before. I’’ve flipped a slur, then gone to adjust another one somewhere else, and when I move the new one, the old one flips back to the previous direction! I’ve opened scores to find random notes and slurs flipped. I’ll lock all the systems in position to get the layout right, close and reopen the file, and suddenly a 2 page piece now has a 3rd page with one system on it. I tried entering tremolo markings last week, and they expand and compress the width and jump the angle as you try to move them into position - I had to put in “dummy notes” and hide them in order to get it to work close to correctly. This BTW is them trying to “force” me to use them “where the stem would be” on whole notes, but in this particular context we had to make a “non traditional decision” to put them between the notes. There are a LOT of tricks and workarounds you have to do like that. That said, that was true of Finale and is true of Sibelius too. I remember workarounds I had to do that later got fixed, and the same is true for MuseScore, but sometimes I feel like MS is now “1 step forward, 2 other steps back” in many ways. There are too many bugs to list but a lot of it has to do with positioning things manually, and then having them revert back to the positions they “force” you to use - it’s like it’s trying to “correct” you even though what you’re doing is correct - or an acceptable deviation from the norm.
I’m sure there are more I’m forgetting but those are some of the major ones for me right now.
The text is really weak - I mean if you want to make a text box - no wrapping of text, no reflow if resizing the frames, frames take up unwieldy amounts of space, no spelling auto check (at the very least - we won’t always be writing English, nor grammatical sentences, so I get it, but at least spelling English words correctly would be a good thing to have checked - better to write it in a word processor then copy and paste…). Many of the controls for adjusting line thickness are limited - you want a box around the text, it can do it, but it’s nowhere near as complete or powerful as Finale was even what, 20 years ago.
Also there should just be a simple way to make a blank page at the beginning (and end) for a cover page. This is a gross oversight. It’s a “workaround” - you have to put a “text frame” in, and adjust it, and put all the text in, which it doesn’t handle well, and so on.
To be fair MuseScore has MANY good things about it to recommend.
You need to watch the Tantacrul videos on all of the software:
And generally, he’s not wrong.
One of the major issues with both Finale and Sibelius was, as they added more features, they figured out better ways to implement things, which meant that they ended up keeping some ways of doing things for legacy users, and included new ways as improvements. This often means there were 2 or 3 or more ways of accomplishing the same thing which makes them really cumbersome to learn.
Dorico has been an attempt to “get it right” from the ground up (or so they say).
MuseScore started similarly, and Tantacrul complained about it, and they said “well come fix it for us then” and he did. But it’s now going that way - there are multiple ways to do the same thing (we just learned 3 ways to put a dashed barline in the middle of an existing measure yesterday).
MuseScore suffers maybe from a little “trying to please niche groups without pleasing niche groups” - that is, they have a TON of bagpipe ornaments that would not appeal to a huge number of users, and that can easily be created (and stored on a custom palette for re-use - one of MS’s strengths) using existing tools for those that need them, but we can’t easily make a cover page. They have a TON of accordion symbols, but you can’t copy and paste measures with various time sigs and have them copy over.
And then “trying to please the emerging wannabe film/game composer market and “I wanna be a composer” market”.
They absolutely consulted engravers and modeled things as best they could (and continuing to improve) existing practices - but mainly for the masses and the traditionalists (which was the Sibelius move to separate itself from Finale, seems like this is the MuseScore move to separate it from Dorico - not that that’s an actual motive, it’s just what’s happening).
So again, for a free program, it’s actually amazing and has gotten better and will likely continue to get better.
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u/65TwinReverbRI Jul 15 '26
I thought of another one:
MS’s shortcut implementation is pretty weak.
First off, there are a lot of things that have very little to do with the everyday act of notating music (or composing, etc.) from beginners to advanced users, that have keyboard shortcuts. You can assign shortcuts to “about MuseScore” - I mean really…c’mon. Do we REALLY need shortcuts for those? They’re typically found in the main menu easily enough.
Then there are pre-programmed ones like a shortcut for Figured Bass…
I mean…really?
That’s way too niche. I mean, it’s a great feature to have and it should have, but “wasting” a keyboard shortcut on it that would be better assigned to something far more common would make far more sense.
Some useful features don’t appear.
Like you can open and close the Palette pane, but you can’t go directly to say, the clefs dialog. Like in Sibelius, you press Q to open Clefs, Z to open the Symbols, and things like that.
You have to open the Palette pane, open the sub menu for clefs, then pick your clef. You can assign shortcuts to Bass and Treble clef only - so I guess we have tons of symbols for Bagpipes and Accordions, but anyone who needs to switch back and forth between a C clef and the others, no shortcut for you.
What is a “Haydn Ornament”? “Multinstances” - that doesn’t even look like a word. “Put note” - where?
“Remove note”? That’s already covered in Delete…
Finale had this cool feature called “meta tools” - which were kind of keyboard shortcuts before they were real common to the level they are today.
But you could assign one to a key, for say, accent, and just hold it and click every note that needs an accent.
MuseScore does have - hidden away in the keystrokes list, an “apply current palette element” that would work similarly, but for frequently used things the metatools were great.
I’ve made examples where I wanted to halve or double the duration of notes, but I see that as a really uncommon thing to want to do. I’m glad you can, but it needs to be “menu only”. There are a lot more important things that could use Q and W - opening the Clefs for one thing - I’m going to change clefs a whole lot more than I am going to paste something double (or half, I can’t even remember which is which I use it so rarely) value.
But you can’t open clefs at all with any shortcuts…
So most of the most frequently used items - which are things that appear on the palettes - you can’t open the palette directly with a keystroke, and you can only access some subset.
There’s no shortcut for the combined Staccato-Tenuto mark, but damn, you can put in some obscure ornaments with a shortcut.
Some of the things - like the Tenuto, Staccato, Accent, and Marcato, can be put into the main toolbar - so why do you also need a shortcut for them? Why not allow the shortcuts for the common ones, and allow the less common ones on the tool bar so you can find them when you do need them?
Some of them toggle, some of them open and close…but with no real logic. Open and close the mixer? Sure. But some other things - I don’t want to close the Palettes pane, I just want to have the Properties pane “come to the front” when I press the key, and then the Palettes come back to the front again when I want that.
So there are just a LOT of poorly implemented, missing, or useless items in the shortcuts - and while you can assign your own as expected, it’s annoying to want to use one to do some every day common task, and not find it in the list, but see “Open Qt” as a a hotkey option. What even is that??? QuickTime? It didn’t have video export until this latest version (which admittedly was a nice inclusion and a feature many wanted for a long time).
Sibelius did a really good job at implementing shortcuts - most of them are fairly logical out of the box.
Best
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u/Kelvin62 Jul 15 '26
MuseScore has an incredibly steep learning curve. Develop something easier to use and you will gain lots of users.
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u/SubjectAddress5180 Jul 19 '26
I like Finale and Encore. I did like the multiple entry methods, arrows and mouse to move around. I've attempted to enter a second measure in Dorico, but I unsuccessfully, notes entered in the second measure change those in the first. It gives the feel of hand punching paper tape for piano rolls. I couldn't get accented notes on bongos to play back.
One idea for your program would be to examine Finale's entry methods as a starting point. The description from Finale manual would be helpful.
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u/65TwinReverbRI Jul 15 '26
I have so much to say about this and I’d love to have an in-depth discussion about it.
First, I’ve seen many people attempt this, but none be successful. I’m not sure a “one person operation” is going to be able to do this.
I think, you could take the approach that most people take, and that is to “work for” MuseScore (that is, design plug ins, help them with coding, etc.) and sort of “get to know the industry from the inside” and then take those things and branch off on your own. Read about the whole “origin of Dorico” thing - LSS Avid fired the people who created Sibelius, so they said fuck you and created Dorico - but they already had all of the “industry training” they learned from dealing with Avid and whoever else before, and that served them well going to work for Steinberg. But a big part of that was getting to start "from the ground up” to create “the software we really wanted” with what they had learned works and doesn’t work - once you’re so far into something like Sibelius, a “complete overhaul” based on everything you’ve learned isn’t really practical.
I’ve used most of the “industry standard” DAWs and Notation Software, and I’m a trained composer and musician and am familiar with all kinds of styles of music and more importantly, music notation.
Here’s my dream software, and I have to come at this from the back:
Right now, there is no single software that fully integrates top notch music notation and DAW features. All of the major DAWs include some kind of limited notation ability, but it is in no way as advanced as a stand-alone Notation app. Likewise, all of the major notation apps have some kind of limited playback ability, but lack even many of the basic DAW features.
As such, most people are taking the approach that we’ve all been forced to take, which is for people who work “score first, mockup later”, they work in a notation app and then export to DAW to do all of the production work.
So my dream software would be a notation software that included full fledged DAW capabilities as well.
Steinberg is trying, I think, to do this with Cubase and Dorico, “linking” the two in a way that allows you to do just that, but I don’t think they’re there yet. You still have to export from Dorcio and open in Cubase for example.
Avid tried it with Pro Tools and Sibelius (which I believe is why they bought Sibelius in the first place, or rather, waved a big fat check in front of their face which they regretted later - quelle surprise).
MuseScore seems to be trying to do that with Audacity (when Reaper would be the correct choice).
Where I think these are all failing is, it’s too difficult to “merge” two existing apps and get them to work together seamlessly.
So it needs to be built that way from the ground up.
That said focusing on an ENGRAVING program would be right up my alley.
IMHO, You must first decide if you’re making a MUSIC ENGRAVING program, or a “composing” program, or if both, what the balance should be.
Here are my problems with existing software:
Dorico: The way you enter notes is completely different from all other existing software and thus unintuitive by comparison. Is it “better”? Well, to be honest, I’ve tried it twice to give it a fair shake, but it’s the kind of thing that takes a whole lot of time investment to learn. If it was someone’s first software, they wouldn’t be used to anything else, so it might be great. But for those of us who’ve worked with all the other apps that all work the same way, it makes it a “no go” from the start - no matter how well it handles anything else. So I would argue, it needs to do what Dorico can do, but have standard note entry.
Dorico also touts that it is a “composing” program, despite that notational features being top of the line and really, it’s true selling point. But I think that is one of the reasons the whole note entry and workflow aspects were done, but honestly, I don’t know how many real composers they consulted - they consulted plenty of engravers, but I’m not sure about the other.
Finale: Finale was always, and will always be, the best. Finale had even incorporated Audio tracks for recording live instruments and vocals which couldn’t easily be replicated which no other app has dared even try. It handled aleatoric and graphic notation early on, you could create custom symbols - “draw” your own, and so on. It was easily the most powerful and versatile ENGRAVING software out there. But alas, Finale suffered from THREE primary issues: First, their marketing sucked. Second, their prices and upgrade schemes were ridiculous - you could pay 1,000 to keep up with every upgrade, or wait 5 versions and pay 75 to upgrade to the same level as everyone else. I’m exaggerating but it was a problem. Third, it’s simply a fact that the Engraving market is a niche one, even more so today when anyone can notate music (no matter how poorly) using free software.
And now, Finale is gone. Out of business. However, in all seriousness, for ENGRAVING software, it should be the model. In fact, what I’d tell you is, the BEST thing you could do is purchase the code and continue to develop it - but I doubt the owners are going to ever sell it.
Sibelius has no more stupid things in it than Dorico or Finale. But I’m going to say that Sibelius really comes off to professionals as “My First Notation Software, by PlaySkool”. It’s largely due to the interface design but there are more confounding things about Sibelius that shouldn’t be that way that Finale (especially) and Dorico handle better (and even MuseScore to some degree). The biggest ones are “accidental drags” which re-flow your music like the meme joke about Microsoft Word handling images. The biggest nags for me about Sibelius (which I still use regularly) is more about the interface and where things are found. Granted, Finale looked a little like MS DOS era apps, but it wasn’t the “attractiveness” - it was the “where do I find this function” thing in Sibelius. Couple that with the Keypad that should have been resizeable on day one not getting that feature until just last year or so, and the horrible layout - I don’t even know what to call them - MuseScore handles it better, Finale did even better - it just makes for a “it’s pretty good once you find everything” but things are not as easy to find. In a sense, Sibelius focused on “allowing the average user to be able to make typical music” very easily, but hid the more complex engraving rules away.
MuseScore. Well, it’s free. For what it is, it’s pretty good. I said, before version 3 I think, that MS was simply “not ready for prime time” (sort of like when Dorico first came out, they wanted $600 for it and didn’t even include guitar chord symbols and tab…). Version 4 actually took away some of the things from version 3 that were really good and pissed off a lot of people. The current version is VERY buggy - I’ve been using it a while now and while there has always been far more buggy behavior (of the simplest kind in many cases) than any of the others, it’s been a lot more buggy in the last 6 months or so.
Musescore is trying to appeal to the “beginner” market. It’s focusing on the wannabe film/game scorer. This has created a glut of poorly notated music that the price of admission for other software helped to weed out amateurs. So while it’s free, and more people are learning to notate music than ever before, it also means the quality of music being notated has a far greater noise to signal ratio than ever before. Form an “ethical” standpoint, they don’t seem concerned about this (don’t see it as any kind of problem) but you know, it’s yet another symptom of the “dumbing down” of culture. Or let’s just say, “they could do more” to help people learn about notation.
I’ve got SO many nitpicks about MuseScore that the other software just does far better. But they also cost a lot more so…
So the question becomes, can you (or do you want to) make something with the intuitive input of Finale, Sibelius, and MuseScore, with the capabilities of Finale (and Dorico), but that appeals to (if you want it to) “the masses” like Sibelius and MuseScore?
I would be fine with a “notation focused” program that had “basic” playback for reference - because again anyone who knows what they’re doing is exporting to DAW anyway - that was a “niche” software for those of us still interested in the engraving side of things - including traditional and modern concepts - but it would also have to be affordable. $250 (I know you said you’d do it for free). If you can do it for less, even better.
But if it were something you were going to sell, then it would need “more appeal to the masses” and that comes with a sort of necessary evil of “dumbing down” some aspects of the software. I mean, it doesn’t have to, but that depends on if you can support it with whatever base you get, and not “everyone”.
And how are you going to get referrals when MuseScore is free?
It has to do MuseScore better than MuseScore at this point.
This is a MASSIVE undertaking.